Politico – Two top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been removed from their positions, as the White House ramps up pressure on the agency to increase arrests and deportations to meet President Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, according to an administration official and a person familiar with the decision.
Russell Hott and Peter Berg, who held top positions in the enforcement division of ICE, will return, respectively, to the agency’s Washington field office and to St. Paul, Minnesota.
The shake-up at ICE comes as the president, and his top immigration officials, are increasingly frustrated with the current pace of arrests and deportations — as well as the release of some migrants due to lack of detention capacity. ICE has increased arrests in recent weeks, but the Trump administration continues to face a slew of challenges as it tries to move quickly to fulfill the president’s mass deportations promise, an ambitious undertaking that will take funding, time and resources to scale up.
“If you look at the rest of interior enforcement, it’s about three times higher than it was a year ago today. Three times higher is good, but I’m not satisfied. There are more criminal aliens that need to be arrested, hundreds of thousands,” Border Czar Tom Homan said Tuesday. “Sanctuary cities are putting roadblocks up. We’ve got leaks. So we need to increase the arrests of illegal aliens, especially those with criminal convictions. So we’re going to continue.”
The administration has blitzed the airwaves and social media feeds with announcements of enforcement actions by ICE, and White House social media accounts have highlighted photos of shackled migrants being loaded onto military aircraft and mugshots of arrested migrants. During the last week in January, ICE averaged more than 800 arrests a day, according to data posted on X. But over the last week, the agency has stopped publishing daily arrest figures.
