'New kind of Achilles heel': Trump's latest law enforcement plan may blow up in his face

U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for New Jersey, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., May 23, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

In order to accomplish his campaign promise of deporting millions of immigrants during his second term, President Donald Trump is having to dip into other federal law enforcement agencies' personnel. Now, one analyst is suggesting this could prove politically costly for the administration.

On Thursday, The New Republic's Greg Sargent wrote that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller's crusade to deport record numbers of immigrants is resulting in an unexpected shortage of other law enforcement officers elsewhere. Officers from Homeland Security Investigations and the Drug Enforcement Agency, along with some FBI agents, have now been asked to help with immigration enforcement, essentially postponing unrelated criminal investigations that those officers were conducting.

According to a recent NBC report, Miller berated heads of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for not rounding up enough immigrants. He threatened to fire ICE leadership if they didn't meet Miller's desired quota of 3,000 arrests per day, and that he would also fire the heads of various ICE field offices that posted the bottom 10% of monthly arrest numbers. Miller has now pulled approximately 5,000 officers from other federal law enforcement agencies to ramp up the administration's deportation efforts.

"Shifting that number of law enforcement agents from those types of agencies inevitably will mean fewer resources fighting transnational criminal organizations, drug smuggling, counterterrorism, and child exploitation," former ICE chief of staff Deborah Fleischaker told Sargent.

Sargent then posited that Trump and Miller "shifting extensive law enforcement resources away from serious crimes into deporting noncriminal immigrants" could present an opportunity for Democrats. He proposed that the opposition party point to the shortage of law enforcement resources across the federal government as a way of illustrating that the administration cares less about stopping crime then it does about removing law-abiding immigrants often beloved by their own communities.

The New Republic columnist used the example of Missouri resident and mother of three Ming Li Hui (who was known as "Carol" in her town), who emigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong, being arrested and targeted for deportation despite committing no crime. The town rallied around her and she was ultimately released from custody this week. Sargent said that Trump pilfering law enforcement resources to target people like Carol could ultimately shift American attitudes about immigration toward the Democratic perspective — like opening up more pathways to citizenship — versus deportation.

"To Trump and Miller, all those unauthorized immigrant moms really do constitute a national emergency," Sargent wrote. "But there’s no way majorities agree with this. Democrats: Miller’s private outbursts reveal a new kind of Achilles’ heel on this issue — time to seize on it, and prosecute the case accordingly."

Click here to read Sargent's full column in the New Republic (subscription required).