U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agents have been directed to significantly intensify deportation efforts in the coming days. Instead of arresting a few hundred undocumented individuals daily, ICE agents are now tasked with increasing the number of arrests to between 1,200 and 1,500 per day, according to a report from the Washington Post citing sources familiar with the plan.
The new quotas were outlined in a briefing with senior ICE officials on Saturday, who were informed that each of the agency’s field offices must make at least 75 arrests daily. Field office leaders who fail to meet these new quotas will be held accountable, according to four sources familiar with the matter. “It’s going very well. We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out,” Trump said of the deportation operations earlier this week while meeting with Hurricane Helene survivors in North Carolina. “These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen. We’re taking them out first.”
Tom Homan, the border czar, has stated that the administration is focused on deporting individuals who pose major threats to public safety, such as illegal aliens with serious criminal records. “We gave them the direction to prioritize public safety threats that we’re looking for. We’ve been working on the target list,” Homan told Fox News in response to early deportation efforts, which so far have resulted in hundreds of arrests and deportations in the early days of Trump’s second term.
The new ICE quotas are expected to result in more arrests of undocumented individuals who do not meet the criteria for top-priority public safety threats. Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to President Trump and a key figure in the administration’s immigration policy, criticized the Washington Post report in an X post. The article claimed that ICE officials would soon engage in “human rights abuses” to meet the quotas, while referring to undocumented individuals as “non-criminals” and “migrants without a criminal record.” Miller called out the absurdity of this language in his post on Sunday evening.
“‘Non criminals’ is a strange word to use for foreign nationals who have broken into America, stolen jobs, stolen identities, illegally refused to appear before an immigration judge, illegally refused to depart when ordered, illegally claimed tax benefits, illegally paid cartels…,” Miller wrote.
ICE announced Sunday on X that it had joined five other federal agencies in “enhanced targeted operations” in Chicago “to enforce U.S. immigration law and preserve public safety and national security by keeping potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities.” The agency has placed particular focus on “sanctuary cities,” which defy federal immigration law by refusing to allow local law enforcement to work with ICE.