A shakeup is looming at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because Donald Trump’s White House has become increasingly frustrated with the pace of arrests of undocumented immigrants -- and now jobs are on the line.

According to a report from the New York Times, regional ICE officials are being asked to explain why arrest numbers are down which led former senior ICE official Claire Trickler-McNulty to explain, “They are under constant threat; people are ground down; it’s a culture of fear.”

Noting that the agency has been in constant turmoil, Trickler-McNulty added, “There has been so much shuffling of deck chairs — I can’t imagine anyone even having the ability to take on real challenges.”

According to the Times’ Hamed Aleaziz and Tyler Pager, “The proposed shake-up illustrates how the administration is still scrambling to satisfy Mr. Trump’s demand to crack down on immigration, an issue at the heart of his political agenda, even as the president and his top aides have promoted their efforts to secure the border and deport hundreds of thousands of people.”

With the administration setting a goal of 600,000 deportations by the end of Trump’s first year of his second term, the report states the numbers are falling from the proposed 3,000 immigrants per day, ordered by Trump advisor Stephen Miller, down to slightly more than 1,000 a day.

Despite a massive influx of funding, the lack of results is becoming a bone of contention within the agency.


The Times report notes, “As ICE arrest numbers have lagged, Border Patrol officials have taken on a larger role in immigration enforcement, in sweeps at big-box stores and in a sprawling operation at an apartment complex in Chicago. ICE efforts, by contrast, typically focus on a single subject at a time.”


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