It begins with a personnel decision, but it stands for far more than mere administrative reshuffling. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the core of Donald Trump’s massive deportation policy, is undergoing a profound restructuring – and the new leadership sends a clear message. Those who steer this apparatus in the future are not expected to manage – but to execute. Not to slow down – but to accelerate.
On Tuesday, the agency went public with a terse press release: leadership changes in several key areas – especially in those divisions tasked with tracking, arresting, and deporting individuals whom the government deems unlawfully present. Key positions in the investigative division, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), were also reassigned.
Kenneth Genalo, previously the acting head of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), is retiring – but will remain involved as a “Special Government Employee,” a form of government-paid consultancy with access to the inner workings of the agency. Robert Hammer, the acting head of investigations, is being reassigned elsewhere within ICE headquarters. Stepping in are Marcos Charles at the helm of ERO and Derek Gordon at HSI. Two men who, according to internal sources, are seen as “tough enforcers” – less administration, more action.
Officially, it is stated that these changes are intended “to help ICE achieve President Trump and the American people’s mandate of arresting and deporting criminal illegal aliens and making American communities safe.” Language that leaves nothing to interpretation. But it goes beyond words.
Stephen Miller, architect of the toughest immigration policies of the Trump era and now deputy chief of staff at the White House, had already set the tone earlier in the week. In a Fox News appearance, he bluntly announced the goal: 3,000 arrests per day.. That’s just the beginning – Trump, Miller said, wants to increase that number every single day.
A glance at the numbers shows what that means. Between January 20, Trump’s inauguration, and May 19, ICE made 78,155 arrests. That translates to an average of about 656 arrests per day – the new goal would nearly quintuple that figure.
What sounds like mere statistics in reality means more raids, more home searches, more prisoner convoys, more flights into the unknown. But ICE is already reaching its operational limits. The number of so-called Enforcement and Removal Officers – the agents tasked with locating, detaining, and removing people without legal status – has not increased in years. There’s also a shortage of detention beds – and of planes large enough to carry out the planned mass removals logistically.
That is why the Trump administration is planning a new escalation: a multibillion-dollar funding package in Congress intended to bolster the immigration enforcement apparatus – in staffing, in technology, in operational reach. The plan aims to deport 1 million people annually and detain 100,000 at any given time. Ten thousand new ICE officers and investigators are to be recruited. This is no longer administration – this is industrial-scale migration control.
All of this resembles an apparatus that no longer differentiates – but processes. A machine that does not ask – but executes. And whose legitimacy is rooted in a political rhetoric that no longer recognizes any boundary between law and repression. The distinction between “illegal” and “criminal” blurs until anyone without papers is declared a threat.
Let there be no illusions: these structural overhauls, these new numerical targets, these leadership rotations – they are not isolated actions. They are part of a larger picture. A strategy that relies on control instead of integration. On fear instead of justice. And on speed instead of constitutional principles.
Anyone familiar with the Krome Detention Center in Miami – that place where people have waited for years to be deported, sometimes for months, sometimes for years – knows what it means when candles are lit outside and the lights inside are never allowed to go out. On May 24, just days before the restructuring, relatives held a vigil there – for those who died in ICE custody, and for those who may soon follow.
It is a quiet image. But it says everything.
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