2 top ICE officials are reassigned amid Trump administration frustrations over immigration arrests

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two top immigration enforcement officials have been reassigned amid frustrations in the Trump administration about the pace of immigration arrests, according to two officials with knowledge of the moves.

Staff members at Immigration and Customs Enforcement were informed Tuesday evening that two top officials in the agency responsible for finding and removing immigrants in the country illegally — Russell Hott and Peter Berg — had been reassigned, according to a Department of Homeland Security official and an administration official. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

The Department of Homeland Security said ICE “needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of for the past four years.”

“We have a President, DHS Secretary, and American people who rightfully demand results, and our ICE leadership will ensure the agency delivers,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said Wednesday in an emailed statement.

Berg will return to the ICE office in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to the Homeland Security official who spoke to the AP. Hott will return to ICE’s Washington field office, according to The Washington Post, which was first to report the reassignments.

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Todd Lyons, who was recently the top immigration enforcement official in the Boston area, will assume the top position at Enforcement and Removal Operations, and his deputy will be Garrett Ripa, the officials told the AP.

They said no reason was given for the reshuffle. But it came the day President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said he was unsatisfied with the pace of immigration arrests and with recent releases of people from immigration custody.

ICE — specifically, its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm — is the key agency tasked with carrying out the Republican president’s pledge of mass deportations of people in the country illegally during his second term.

The Trump administration has given out limited information about how many people in the country illegally have been arrested.

From Jan. 23 to Jan. 31, officials shared data on X daily then stopped publishing information. The agency’s data dashboard has more information but those quarterly figures are only current as of Sept. 2024. During the seven-day day period when ICE released daily data, they averaged 787 arrests a day, compared to a daily average of 311 during a 12-month period that ended Sept. 30 during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

On Monday, the White House said in a video highlighting Trump’s accomplishments that ICE had arrested 11,000 “criminals” over 18 days. That averages out to about 611 arrests per day.

Homan, speaking to reporters outside the White House, said arrests in the interior — of those who haven’t recently arrived in the country — is about three times higher than it was this time last year, under President Joe Biden.

“Three times higher is good. But I’m not satisfied,” Homan said. “We got to get more.”

Homan said he had also talked to ICE leadership about the number of people who had been released from immigration custody. From now on, he said, no one would be released without ICE leadership signing off.

“The number of releases was unacceptable,” Homan said, “and that’s been fixed.”

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Follow the AP’s coverage of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at https://apnews.com/hub/us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement.