Trump brings deportation chiefs into White House, away from entrenched agencies

President-elect Donald Trump’s nods for immigration and border-related posts appear to suggest he plans to keep the major-decision making on those issues within the White House rather than in offices of executive branch agencies filled with career government employees. Trump has vowed to pursue the mass deportation of illegal aliens from the country, beginning on his first day. He has cited President Dwight Eisenhower’s "Operation Wetback" as precedent for such an undertaking. 

"When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag," Trump told NBC News last week. Mass deportations enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, according to some surveys. Fifty-four percent of respondents supported mass deportations in a recent Scripps News/Ipsos poll, for example.

His first administration saw internal leaks often frustrate his efforts to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants, but he appears prepared to avoid comparable obstacles by working outside of the traditional agencies, to some extent. Over the long weekend, Trump named former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan to serve as his “border czar,” saying he “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”

Immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, moreover, received the nod for deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller was behind many of the Trump administration’s deportation initiatives during his first term in office. Under the Biden administration, he led America First Legal and successfully challenged many of its own initiatives.

Appointments bring deportations to the White House

Homan’s “czar” position is not a standard cabinet post and may often go to administration members holding other jobs. Vice President Kamala Harris, for instance, received the nod from President Joe Biden in 2021, though she insisted border security remained the purview of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and that she would focus on international efforts to curb migration.

Though ICE is part of the DHS and deportations would typically fall under the DHS secretary’s purview, Homan’s appointment to the “border czar” post will keep him outside of the executive agencies and closer to Trump.

South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, moreover, will lead the Department of Homeland Security. An early Trump surrogate, Noem largely fell off the campaign trail after the release of a book in which she described killing her dog. In her second term, Noem deployed the state National Guard to the southern border as part of a broader effort to aid Texas authorities in securing the border amid perceived federal apathy toward the surge in border crossings.

Noem herself has long been called an immigration hardliner in step with Homan and Miller, but their posts in the White House are likely to grant them louder voices on the president-elect’s signature issue. His past experience with DHS on deportations could serve to explain while two of his top immigration figures will be working closer to the Oval Office.

DHS internal resistance

During the first administration, Trump’s deportation efforts were often thwarted by timely leaks from within the DHS under then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Homan’s position outside the agency would conceivably help to insulate Trump’s agenda against such internal leaks.

The president-elect and his supporters have long railed against the so-called “deep state,” asserting that the vast majority of unelected career officials in the executive branch agencies oppose his agenda and either slow-walk his orders or actively obstruct their implementation.

Though dismissed as a conspiracy theory by his opponents, senior DHS officials such as Miles Taylor, the DHS chief of staff, admitted in 2020 that he had penned an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, entitled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

“There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first,” he wrote. The op-ed included scathing indictments of Trump’s personal leadership style and described the efforts of administration officials to constrain his impulses. Taylor notably highlighted instances in which he asserted that Trump’s staffers “knew better” than he did and seemed to celebrate the administration “boxing” Trump into its preferred policy positions on Russia.

“He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior,” Taylor wrote. “But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable. This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.”

Elation among Border Patrol and ICE agents

Should Trump contend with dissident bureaucrats, it seems unlikely they will come from ICE or the Border Patrol, especially in light of Homan’s appointment.

Speaking to Fox News’s Bill Melugin, a number of ICE and Border Patrol officials indicated that Homan’s appointment had led to a surge in morale and prompted some senior officials to reconsider plans to retire or leave the agencies.

"It’s a total 180, troops are finally feeling like the sun is coming out after a very long storm. People are fired up to have support,” one ICE official told Melugin. “It’s amazing because we all became so numb I don’t think we realized how bad until we finally have hope again. Everyone [sic] so happy about Homan's return."

Firing government bureaucrats

Trump, for his part, appears aware of the prospect that DHS officials and other executive agency staffers may attempt to repeat their past efforts and previously unveiled a 10-point plan to combat such actions.

In March of 2023, Trump published an Agenda 47 policy video in which he vowed to reinstate an executive order permitting the president to “fire rogue bureaucrats.” He also vowed mass firings among those agencies to remove “corrupt actors” and to physically separate the Offices of Inspector General from the departments they monitor. 

The plan also included a “major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the media to create false narratives, pressing criminal charges when appropriate.”

Steamrolling through Democratic opponents

Even should Trump overcome internal executive agency opposition, several Democratic states and cities have vowed not to cooperate with federal deportation efforts.

Gov. Maura Healey, D-Mass.; Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill.; Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif.; and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, D; have been among the most high-profile voices promising non-compliance, but the efforts to thwart the administration will likely extend to the multitude of sanctuary cities across the nation. Speaking to Fox News, Homan indicated that he would pursue illegal alien arrests and enter those jurisdictions, with or without their help.

“It’d be great to have law enforcement assist ICE,” Homan said. “I’ve seen some of these Democratic governors saying they’re gonna stand in the way they’re gonna make it hard for us.’

 “If you don’t want to help us, get the hell out of the way because I’m gonna do it,” he added. ”If we can’t get assistance from New York City, we may have to double the number of agents that we send to New York City, because we’re gonna do the job.”