Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Deborah Fleischaker: Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Fleischaker: Look, it would be a huge increase. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it would be that we were arresting probably around 300 a day under the Biden administration. So going up to 1,200 a day would be an exponential increase in arrests. I’m not even sure that they could do that many arrests. But what it would mean is that they have to focus on where they can get numbers, not where they can go after the biggest public safety threats. And from my perspective, you want to make sure that you’re handling those public safety threats first.
Sargent: What Deborah is saying here is that one way you could get those numbers up is to go after the people who are actually checking in with ICE. These are people who are cooperating. They may be awaiting certain types of legal proceedings, that type of stuff. These are not people who are trying to evade the law. They’re cooperating with ICE and you could arrest them to get those numbers up. It’s absurd. So you were at DHS during the first Trump administration at the time. They also tried to hit new deportation levels and failed, right? What was your role there? Why weren’t they able to hit new targets? And how is what we’re seeing now different from Trump 1.0?
In Trump 2.0, they’re trying to increase those variables, certainly with the number of people they’re putting toward it, given that they’re asking other law enforcement agencies to basically give up their normal day jobs and become immigration enforcement officers. But it’s still the aperture of the system. To remove somebody, you need a final order of removal and you need agreement from the home country that they’ll accept them. That doesn’t always happen quickly. You also have a set number of planes; you have a set number of seats. Again, the Trump administration is working by using DOD planes to increase that number—that’s incredibly expensive. There are trade-offs to all of these things. And maybe they can get the numbers up, but the numbers they’re talking about seem wildly optimistic.
Fleischaker: That’s exactly right. Enforcement actions are generally done very carefully and thoughtfully. You need to confirm where somebody is. You have to know when you’re going to arrest them, that you’re arresting them when you’re not going to be in danger as a law enforcement officer. You’re trying to carefully calibrate time and place. You don’t necessarily want to do it in front of their kids, where it’s going to be more challenging and emotionally traumatic for people. There’s lots of things you want to think about when you’re planning an enforcement operation.
Sargent: Can I ask—just to focus in on this population of people who are showing up at ICE offices to check in—you could see a scenario where boosting these quotas and starting to target those people would actually make migrants less likely to check into ICE offices and cooperate in that sense, right?
Sargent: It seems to me the fact that ICE officials are leaking all this right now is potentially an indication that they don’t want that pressure on them to ramp up deportations or arrests to the numbers Trump is demanding, that they see this as counterproductive. As someone who has been at ICE, is that what it looks like to you? And are you in touch with current ICE officials or agents about all this? No need for names, but if you could just tell us what you’re hearing from these people.
Now the Trump administration is going well beyond what we were doing and asking them to do even more. They’re trying to throw bodies at the problem, but it doesn’t solve. At some point you can’t get blood out of a stone, right? They can do what they can do, but no more than that. And I am in contact with folks at ICE. Everybody is working really hard and they are trying to do what people are asking of them. But yes, I think that there’s going to be an increasing level of frustration, that people don’t understand what their job actually requires and what they need to do to do it well, and that they’re being asked to cut corners that they shouldn’t cut corners on.
Fleischaker: Look, that’s not how they talk about it. They don’t say, Oh, it’s going to make us less safe. But what they do say is we can’t do it. It simply isn’t possible to do what’s being asked of us. We have been working really hard. We have been working at 100 percent. We can’t just manufacture more people, more work. We can’t now do 200 percent. We can only do what we can do. I’m hearing that. Other people I’m talking to are hearing that. I can’t say whether it’s common or not, but it’s certainly a regular refrain.
Fleischaker: Yes. Challenging enforcement actions take time and planning and careful execution. And if they’re being required to arrest more and more, whether that’s a quota or not, they can’t take that time that those arrests require. And so, yes, it will ultimately lead people to stop focusing on those and focus on the places where they can get bigger numbers faster.
Fleischaker: It certainly shows that there are people within ICE who think that the current efforts are misguided. Absolutely.
Fleischaker: Yes, that’s true. Absolutely. But it’s even more than that because it’s not just ICE having to change who it goes after. All of these other federal law enforcement agencies have now been given immigration enforcement powers and are being told to do immigration enforcement. So that means they’re going to be diverted from the job that they’re responsible for. For example, ICE Homeland Security Investigations, or ICE HSI, the other operational part of ICE, has lots of other very important national security and criminal responsibilities. They fight transnational criminal organizations. They do fentanyl work. They find and stop kiddie porn. Do we want them to stop doing that work?
Sargent: What you’re saying here is that with Trump setting these arbitrary numbers pulled out of his golden toilet, numbers that will make him feel tough and strong and make MAGA feel like he’s delivering on his promise, that is going to require a shift of resources not just away from targeting dangerous criminals for removal but also from other Homeland Security functions. Is that what you’re saying?
Sargent: Right. So the whole approach, this idea that you just set some arbitrary number and say, Well, we’ve got to hit this number of arrests for removal, makes no sense from a law enforcement perspective, does it?
By saying that they should stop doing those jobs to focus on immigration enforcement, the impact on public safety and national security could be vast. I don’t know what we’re stopping in order to do the immigration enforcement work, but I do trust that it was important enough that they had prioritized it and that they should be doing it.
Fleischaker: I think there’s certainly alarm. I think that people don’t like being asked to do things that don’t make sense, possibly can’t be accomplished, and where they feel like they’re going to be judged on the results. Naturally, that would lead to some unhappiness.
Fleischaker: Absolutely. Nor should they want to be on the hook for those. The Trump administration is very clearly on the hook for those.
Fleischaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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