Frustration Grows Inside the White House Over Pace of Deportations

Just about every week since taking office, President Trump has called Thomas D. Homan, the enforcer of his immigration agenda, looking for an update on mass deportations.

How is it going at the border? What do the arrest numbers look like? Are sanctuary cities still standing in the way of the crackdown?

Mr. Homan’s typical response serves as something of a reality check for the president, whose campaign promise to deport millions of people is colliding with the practical difficulties of detaining immigrants and then transporting them across the globe.

“We need to increase the arrests,” Mr. Homan said he has told Mr. Trump, recounting their conversations in an interview with The New York Times. “They’re not high enough.”

Inside the administration, there is growing frustration about the pace of arrests and deportations, even as Mr. Trump mobilizes the full weight of the federal government behind his mission to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

Mr. Homan acknowledged he could not predict the number of people the administration would deport this year, citing financial shortfalls at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“The more money you have, the more successful we’re going to be,” he said. “So people always ask me, ‘How many you think you can arrest?’ I say I have no idea.”

So far, federal data shows that the administration has made nearly 23,000 arrests in the past month, up sharply compared with the Biden administration. But daily arrests have fallen since immigration agents exploded out of the gates in the opening days of Mr. Trump’s term. And deportations have not kept pace with the number of arrests, which means that the number of people waiting in ICE detention has surged, straining resources.

Mr. Trump has so far been happy with the progress in driving down the number of border crossings to historic lows, people familiar with his thinking say. But the pace of deportations has been a source of vexation in particular for Mr. Homan and Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s aggressive immigration policies, who know that the clock is ticking to make good on the president’s plan.

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Bipartisan frustration with immigration helped propel Mr. Trump back to the White House in November, and his advisers have made sure to promote his crackdown.

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But the immigration raids and roundups do not always go as planned.

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In recent years, immigrant rights activists have educated people that they do not, in fact, need to open the door to ICE officers. Instead, they can wait inside and ignore the requests. Mr. Homan has said the administration will seek more warrants signed by federal judges to be able to enter homes.

ICE would prefer to pick up undocumented immigrants from jails and prisons throughout the United States. But so-called sanctuary cities limit how much local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration agents {snip}

Deporting immigrants can also present diplomatic challenges. The United States has struggled to secure enough planes and deportation agreements with other nations to efficiently return people to their home countries.

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Still, the Trump administration is focused on raising the number of arrests.

To that end, Mr. Trump’s advisers have shaken up ICE leadership. They are considering deporting people who have been found to have a legitimate fear of torture in their home countries to third nations, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. And Mr. Homan said the administration could also reinstate the practice of detaining immigrant families — a tactic that has come under fire because of concerns that detaining children, even with their parents, can cause permanent developmental damage.

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To address the shortage of detention beds, the administration is considering using military sites across the country — an extraordinary use of wartime resources.

The Department of Homeland Security is also pushing the Internal Revenue Service to turn over the addresses of hundreds of thousands of people it wants to deport in a request that could violate taxpayer privacy laws.

But without substantial help from Congress, former ICE officials say, Mr. Trump’s ambition for mass deportations is unlikely.

“Their hands are tied,” said William Figueroa, who was an ICE deportation officer for 35 years. “There’s not enough agents and there’s not enough opportunity to get these people.”

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