WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is planning to replace some regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders with Border Patrol officials in a bid to step up its mass deportation effort amid growing frustration with the pace of daily arrests, according to two Department of Homeland Security officials, a former DHS official and a federal law enforcement official.
President Donald Trump’s top advisers have welcomed the Border Patrol’s more aggressive tactics to secure arrests, such as rappelling into apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters and jumping out of rented trucks in Home Depot parking lots, as they have grown disillusioned with ICE, officials said.
“The mentality is that CBP does what they’re told, and the administration thinks ICE isn’t doing the job,” one of the DHS officials said. “So CBP will do it.”
The White House has approved a list of at least a dozen ICE field agent directors who will be reassigned in the coming days, the two DHS officials, the former DHS official and the federal law enforcement official, said. They said at least half of them would be replaced by Border Patrol officials. ICE has 25 field offices across the country, so the move could replace nearly half of the agency’s leaders.
The list was compiled by Corey Lewandowski, a DHS special government employee who advises Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief who oversees the agency’s operations in Chicago and previously in Los Angeles, the law enforcement official said.
The administration’s shift to rely more on the Border Patrol marks a possible new phase in Trump’s deportation efforts. While ICE has been criticized for its raids, the agency’s broad focus has been on making targeted arrests of immigrants known to be in the country illegally. The Border Patrol’s approach to recent arrests in major U.S. cities has been more aggressive, conducting large raids that have drawn some of the harshest reactions from protesters and sparked lawsuits.
The New York Times was the first to report that the Trump administration was planning a shakeup of ICE leadership amid frustration over arrest numbers, citing three people familiar with the plans.
As of late September, the latest period for which data is available due to the government shutdown, ICE was arresting 1,178 on average per day, well below the 3,000 per day that the main architect of Trump’s deportation policy, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has demanded.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about any plans to reassign ICE leaders, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement: “The president’s entire team is working in unison to implement the president’s policy agenda, and the tremendous results from securing the border to deporting criminal illegal aliens speak for themselves.”
The Border Patrol has deployed more than 1,500 agents to arrest immigrants in cities across the country to help with deportations, Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks told NBC News. By comparison, there are 8,500 agents working for ICE’s law enforcement and deportation operations.
The Border Patrol has been behind some of the most scathing images of immigrant arrests since Trump took office. Earlier this month in Chicago, Border Patrol agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter into an apartment building while families slept. Last week, videos emerged from Chicago of Bovino throwing a gas canister into a crowd.
The incident is now part of a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of using overly aggressive tactics.
Bovino was ordered to appear before a federal judge in Illinois on Tuesday to face questions about whether recent arrest tactics in the Chicago area, including the use of tear gas, violated a temporary restraining order against CBP’s use of excessive force. Attorneys for the plaintiffs have pointed to Bovino’s personal use of tear gas as a possible violation of the judge’s order.
DHS Undersecretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said Monday in a statement to NBC News that Bovino had been hit in the head by a rock. “We hope the American people see the images,” he said.
Some ICE leaders have quietly expressed dismay at Border Patrol tactics in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, the law enforcement official and two DHS officials said.
Two former ICE officials said ICE does not have some of the resources that the Border Patrol has, such as the Black Hawks.
The White House’s frustration with ICE has been growing for months.
In mid-May, Miller told ICE leaders that if they didn’t start arresting 3,000 immigrants a day, he would see leaders from the worst-performing regions pushed out of their positions, according to two people who spoke to meeting attendees.
At the time, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons resisted the idea of firing ICE field office directors, the two people who spoke to meeting attendees.
The Trump administration has increasingly tapped Bovino to oversee Border Patrol operations targeting migrants in major U.S. cities, most recently in Chicago, where Bovino arrived in mid-October and became the public face of the Trump administration’s law enforcement efforts there.
DHS officials said Bovino does not report to the Border Patrol chief or the CBP commissioner, as other Border Patrol sector chiefs do. The law enforcement official said Bovino reports directly to Noem, who called him Commanding General of the Border Patrol in a recent op-ed.
While Lewandowski and Bovino compiled the list of ICE field office directors who could soon be removed, Miller is also keeping it closely within the White House, DHS officials said.
Officials did not know the names of the people on the list, but said they were expected to be directors whose regions underperform in arrest numbers or those who have rejected some of the more aggressive tactics that Miller supports and that the Border Patrol has carried out.
