(NewsNation) — Immigration officials are scrambling to meet the demands of President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan to ramp up the number of migrant arrests.
The Trump administration wants 1,200 to 1,500 arrests a day, but making that happen will require time and patience, said John Fabbricatore, who oversaw ICE’s Denver field office between 2019 and 2022 and ran as a Republican for Congress in 2024.
“It’s like a large train moving down the tracks,” Fabbricatore told NewsNation. “It doesn’t go 100 mph from the start. It takes a little bit of time to get up to that speed.”
About 11,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally have been arrested in recent weeks, but the pace has frustrated Trump and Homan. Two ICE administrators were reassigned this week over unsatisfactory migrant arrests, The Washington Post reported.
How ICE ramps up its operations
Caleb Vitello, the acting ICE director, has instructed that each of the agency’s 25 field offices should be making 75 arrests per day, which would add up to 1,200 to 1,500 nationwide arrests, which represented “a floor, not a ceiling,” according to The Washington Post.
“There’s definitely a tempo that this administration wants achieved, but it’s not like we haven’t achieved that tempo before,” Fabbricatore said.
Each field office is made up of fugitive operations teams, which are assigned to work the streets while other agents are assigned to the “criminal alien program” and scour court dockets to help locate migrants with past orders of removal.
“Sometimes, it’s just a matter of having pieces in the right place to make sure that you can motivate the troops to get out there and get the job done,” Fabbricatore said.
Victor Avila, a retired Homeland Security Investigation special agent, said although the work being done by ICE has not changed, the levels of attention and scrutiny placed on the agency have.
“All of a sudden, people feel like the (arrest totals) are supposed to be much higher than what it is,” Avila said. “But it’s a multifaceted, very cumbersome task when you think about it.”
Trump and Homan have been clear about centering mass deportation efforts around migrants with criminal backgrounds. So far, about 30% of the arrests involved migrants with criminal convictions, while an additional 33% had a final order of removal, ICE reported.
How long can ICE keep up this level of arrests?
Avila says the surge in ICE activity and enforcement is sustainable for 18 to 24 months but that field agents may need to be encouraged to keep up their efforts as expectations from the top remain high.
“(ICE agents) aren’t twiddling their thumbs anymore,” Avila said. “They’re out on the streets, and it’s not going to stop. This is going to be every single day of the Trump administration.”
The agency had been targeting criminal migrants long before Trump took office. ICE reported 113,431 arrests of “non-citizens” in fiscal year 2024, according to its annual report. A year earlier, ICE made 170,590 “non-citizen” arrests, the agency said.
Colleen Putzel, an associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, noted that under former President Joe Biden, arrest numbers hung around 300 a day.
“The key difference is the sort of public-facing narrative with it all (under Trump),” Putzel said. “It’s kind of a messaging tactic, which is a sort of policy tactic of saying, ‘We, as an administration, are tough on unauthorized immigration,’ and it’s meant to, in part, send a message to folks who are in the country irregularly.”
Sanctuary cities, states rebuke ICE arrest orders
As ICE field offices return to a faster pace, sanctuary cities and states like Illinois, California, New York and Colorado have pushed back against the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
“This desire to popularize fear is unconscionable and abhorrent,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson told reporters after Homan’s January visit.
Avila said federal agencies are meeting resistance and where communities are providing protection to those ICE is seeking.
ICE running out of detention space
Fabbricatore believes that a lack of detention space has also slowed the pace of arrests.
Migrants in federal custody have been detained under the purview of the New Orleans field office, which had the most capacity, with 9,400 being held there.
Trump has also announced plans to house people flagged for deportation at Guantanamo Bay and possibly in federal prisons, which would be designated to hold migrants in federal custody.
Less than 100 detainees have been sent to the facility so far, NewsNation has learned. Homeland Security has been directed to prepare the facility for 30,000 migrants.
Until more funding is devoted to the mission, Putzel said, the arrest totals Trump and Homan seek may suffer.
“We know that there are efforts to overcome those capacity constraints,” she told NewsNation. “But this real, outward show of force at the outset is already facing hurdles and barriers because of those constraints to actually carry out the ‘mass deportation’ campaign.”