Disappointment within the Trump administration over the speed of immigration arrests has cost two immigration enforcement officials their top Washington jobs, according to media reports.
The staff shakeup at Immigration and Customs Enforcement came Tuesday evening when employees received notice that Russell Hott and Peter Berg had been reassigned, a Department of Homeland Security official told ABC News. The two senior agency officials were responsible for identifying and removing immigrants in the country illegally.
It comes as the department said in a statement that 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 told ABC News in an emailed statement.
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Berg will resume work at the St. Paul Minnesota ICE office, while Hott will go back to ICE’s Washington field office, according to media reports. A top immigration enforcement official in the Boston region “will assume the top position at Enforcement and Removal Operations,” ABC News reported.
While there was no formal explanation for the reassignments, it came a day after President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan aired his dissatisfaction with the rate of immigration arrests in the weeks since the administration began its crackdown on migrants in the country illegally.
Trump promised to make mass deportations a top priority in his second term but has reportedly grown angry that his policies aren’t yielding the number of daily deportations he had expected.
