The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump is already unhappy about the pace of deportations under his presidency. The Washington Post reports that Trump officials have instructed ICE to aggressively ramp up the number of daily arrests to make Trump happy, even setting quotas and threatening to discipline those who fall short of them. But something else in this report caught our eye: The pressure to meet those quotas will make it more likely that ICE officials sweep in noncriminal immigrants, which reveals the absurdity of all the Trump/White House propaganda on deportations we’ve been seeing. They’ll now have to target less dangerous offenders to keep up appearances that Trump is strong and powerful. Today, we have a great guest to demystify all this: Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior official at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for many years, including during the first Trump administration. Deborah, thanks for coming on.
Deborah Fleischaker: Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Sargent: This Washington Post report says that officials with ICE have been informed by Trump officials to arrest at least 1,200 to 1,500 people per day because Trump is “disappointed” with his mass deportations so far. Trump people are denying this, but the bottom line is they really are asking for a very large ramped up deportation total, even if they’re not asking for exact quotas. Can you put this in perspective for us? How many average arrests were we seeing daily under Biden? And how big a scaling up would what Trump wants really amount to?
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.
Now, you could arrest people who are checking in at ICE offices—that wouldn’t be how I would suggest people do it, they’re already complying. But they could do that. It just, again, means that we’re diverting resources from the people who I think the Trump administration promised to focus on and who I would argue we should be focusing on.
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?
Fleischaker: It is hard to get numbers up. The Obama administration did increase the number of deportations, of removals. So for the Trump administration under Trump 1.0 to continue to increase them was challenging, given the resources in terms of the dollars you had to put toward that and the number of law enforcement officers you had to put toward that.
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.
Sargent: Here’s where it seems like things become really problematic for Trump. His borders czar Tom Homan keeps saying in the media that they’re mainly targeting dangerous criminals for removal right now because they know it’s bad press for them if they divert resources away from the dangerous criminals to remove longtime residents who don’t pose a public safety threat. But in order to get the numbers juiced up to hit Trump’s quotas, it seems like they’ll operationally have to target more broadly and sweep in noncriminals, right? Can you lay that out for us, explain why that’s the case?
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.
If numbers are the only thing that matter, you’re going to stop doing the enforcement operations that are more difficult, which are often the criminal undocumented population, and go after the people who you feel safer going after, who you can do more quickly with less planning. But that has public safety implications because we want to be going after the most dangerous people. We want to be going after the worst of the worst and the people who have been released from prisons and jails after serving their sentences. Those are the people we want to be removing.
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?
Fleischaker: Absolutely. It’s the law of unintended consequences here. Maybe you get a week or two weeks of great arrest numbers because you’re getting the people who are presenting themselves to you every day. But eventually people are going to get hip to that and they’re going to stop showing up, which is bad for the system writ large. It drives down the arrest numbers, so you’re not even getting what Trump wants. And you’re stopping people who want to cooperate with the government from cooperating with the government.
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.
Fleischaker: The men and women of ICE enforcement and removal operations, the people who generally are responsible for immigration and interior immigration enforcement, are hardworking law enforcement officers who want to do a good job. They are being put in an impossible situation where they’re being asked to do more than they can. When I was there, we asked them to do more all the time. And we were told at the time, We don’t have the resources. We’re tapped out. We’re already doing more with less and we don’t have more people or money to throw at the problem.
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.
Sargent: Are people saying to you that this risks actually backfiring and making people less safe because it will divert resources toward the easy pickups?
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.
Sargent: Just to confirm though, the basic refrain—even if they don’t use those exact words—that they’re making to you is that the pressure to hit these arbitrary numbers requires a diversion or would require a diversion of resources away from the more difficult operations that are targeted at the people we really need to remove and toward the easier low-hanging fruit as it were, people who are less urgent to remove, right? That’s what you’re hearing?
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.
Sargent: Deborah, what does it tell you that these leaks are happening? It itself is an indication of serious dissatisfaction with this pressure to ramp up, right?
Fleischaker: It certainly shows that there are people within ICE who think that the current efforts are misguided. Absolutely.
Sargent: There’s a big lie lurking at the core of all this that I want to try to get at. Trump and MAGA have to sustain the fiction that Biden and Democrats generally have been so reluctant to carry out removals of migrants that it poses a massive threat to ordinary people. That’s what Trump campaigned on relentlessly. The truth is: Under Democratic administrations, you had a lot of deportations and critically, by design, they were aimed at dangerous criminals mainly as well as is happening now. And it’s actually really hard operationally for Trump to do something different from that, right? That’s what it seems like they’re bumping up against. The basic problem is that any responsible administration is going to go after the public safety threats first. For Trump to create the illusion that he’s doing something more significant is impossible without sweeping more broadly.
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?
To me, I don’t think so, especially when it’s not clear that they’re going to be going after these really dangerous people. We need them focused on national security and public safety. And by diverting all of these hardworking law enforcement officers to immigration enforcement, we’re stopping that other really important 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?
Fleischaker: Homeland Security and others. They’re using DEA and ATF and FBI, right? It’s all of them. All of those functions are going to be impacted because they’re working on immigration enforcement as opposed to their core functions.
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?
Fleischaker: I certainly don’t think it does. Look, immigration enforcement is important. I will defend the need for immigration enforcement. We should have a functioning immigration system—enforcement and removal is a piece of that. I will defend ICE every day. They have an important job to do and they try to do it well, but so does the FBI and so does ICE HSI and so does ATF and so does DEA. They also have very important law enforcement jobs.
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.
Sargent: And now you’ve got ICE officials leaking to the press their unhappiness with the pressure that’s being put on them. It seems to me clearly that there’s a fair amount of alarm internally about where this is going.
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.
Sargent: Right. At the end of the day, these are law enforcement professionals and they’re looking down the road at a scenario where bad things could happen to the public as a result of these reprioritizations, and they don’t want to be on the hook for those.
Fleischaker: Absolutely. Nor should they want to be on the hook for those. The Trump administration is very clearly on the hook for those.
Sargent: Well, it’s sure looking like this is heading to a very terrible place. Deborah Fleischaker, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
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.