Current and former officials are reportedly frustrated the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency hasn’t been able to arrest and detain more people in recent months, despite ICE getting an unprecedented $45 billion in new funding to expand its detention capacities as part of the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” spending package in July.
The average number of migrants in custody per day has barely grown since the infusion of funding, while immigration arrests have fallen 11 percent since June and remain well below the administration’s reported 3,000 person-per-day goal, though deportations have tripled overall since January.
“There’s extreme frustration that the president’s agenda—when it comes to ICE beds, and therefore deportations—is not going to happen,” a former DHS employee told The Atlantic, which reported on the alleged internal tensions.
“The White House worked for months to get the reconciliation bill over the finish line. Why did you just lobby Congress for months saying you needed the money if you don’t intend to spend it?”
The officials pointed to a few key factors behind the pace, including a reported Homeland Security policy requiring Secretary Kristi Noem to personally sign off on contracts worth more than $100,000, as well as the influence of DHS advisor Corey Lewandowski.
During his time advising the department, DHS has appeared to prioritize agreements with Republican-led jurisdictions such as Louisiana and Florida to use state detention facilities to house federal immigration detainees, rather than at the typically lower-cost, higher capacity privately run facilities that have long been a fixture of the U.S. immigration system.
The DHS advisor has defended the administration’s strategy, arguing it is securing fairer agreements with detention providers.
“We are asking all vendors to provide the best value,” Lewandowski told the magazine of his negotiations with detention contractors. “They’ve all come back and said, ‘You know what? We can do better. We can do better because we understand.’”
He also dismissed claims that he and Noem are pursuing state-led agreements with an eye towards building Noem’s political profile for a rumored 2028 vice-presidential campaign, calling such thinking “absurd” and pointing to Noem’s established political profile and connections from her time as governor of South Dakota.
The Trump administration has said it intends to use the increased funding to bulk out the immigration detention network to greater than 100,000 beds, though current capacity appears to be tens of thousands beds fewer than this goal.
That could complicate the rollout of a related White House initiative to use $30 billion to hire 10,000 more immigration officers by the year’s end.
As the Trump administration pursues what it hopes will be a record number of deportations, existing detention facilities have faced overcrowding and poor conditions, according to lawyers and detainees themselves.
At least 17 people died in immigration detention this fiscal year, which ended in September, up from 12 the previous period, marking one of the deadliest years for immigration detainees in the last two decades.
