Battles Are Raging Inside the Department of Homeland Security

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared before a bank of television cameras in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night to blame the man who had been shot to death by federal agents in Minneapolis that morning for his own death, claiming without evidence that he had intended “to kill law enforcement” and had been “brandishing” a weapon. Behind her stood the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Rodney Scott, sending a silent message of unity.

But behind the scenes, the senior ranks of the Department of Homeland Security were divided. Until minutes before they walked in front of the cameras, Noem and Scott had not spoken to each other that day, even as Noem took charge of her department’s response to the shooting and coordinated with the White House and other officials in Scott’s agency, two people familiar with their interactions told us.

Donald Trump has said over the years that he welcomes and even encourages rivalries in his administration, and delights in watching aides compete to please him. But for the past year, the president has allowed a rift to widen within the team tasked with delivering on the mass-deportation plan that is his most important domestic-policy initiative. That has led to months of acrimony and left many veteran officials at DHS—including those who support the president’s deportation goals—astonished at the dysfunction.

The president’s crackdown has adopted an improvisational approach, not an institutional one, with blurred leadership roles and no clear chain of command. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been holding daily conference calls pressuring DHS and other federal agencies to prioritize immigration arrests and deportations above all other objectives. Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, who has been working at DHS as a “special government employee,” have aggressively tried to meet Miller’s demands and use the department’s advertising budgets and social-media accounts to promote anti-immigrant messaging. They have worked around Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has had little role in operations, instead dispatching a second-tier Border Patrol official named Gregory Bovino to sweep through cities led by Democrats. Bovino told his superiors that he reported directly to Noem, not to Scott—who wanted his agents to go back to protecting U.S. borders, and has struggled to maintain control of his own agency.

This story about the infighting around Trump is based on interviews with 12 people familiar with the tensions inside DHS, including senior administration officials, most of whom requested anonymity to speak frankly about internal events. “The President’s entire immigration enforcement team are on the same page,” the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote to us in response.

Scott and Homan declined to comment. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, told us that Noem’s Saturday comments on the shooting were based on CBP reports “from a very chaotic scene.” McLaughlin added, “We are not going to spend time giving any oxygen to these anonymous accounts.”

When Noem and Scott stepped before the cameras on Saturday, Noem appeared to have the upper hand. But the balance of power has since shifted. Frustrated by the bipartisan backlash to Alex Pretti’s death, Trump announced on Monday that Homan would take over the operation in Minnesota. Bovino has been stripped of his “commander” role and sent back to his old job on the border in El Centro, California. Seemingly well aware of the divides around him, Trump announced that he was removing Noem from the chain of command in Minnesota. “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me,” Trump said.

When Homan spoke to reporters today, with Scott standing behind him, he tried striking a conciliatory tone and that he’d arrived to make changes in federal operations. “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines,” he said. Homan urged Minnesota leaders to give ICE more access to detainees in local jails, and said he’d withdraw federal forces if cooperation improves.

Homan and Scott arrived in the state Monday with orders to de-escalate tensions in Minneapolis, which Trump has flooded with 3,000 federal agents—the largest Homeland Security deployment in history. That same day, Noem and Lewandowski were called into the White House for a two-hour meeting with the president and some of his top aides, but not with Miller. The following day, Trump said that he had come to share the concerns of Scott and Homan, saying that it was normal for him to “shake up teams.”

“You know, Bovino is very good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy,” Trump told Fox News. “And in some cases that’s good; maybe it wasn’t good here.”

But the battle inside the agency continued. Scott sent an email to senior officials at CBP on Monday reminding them that he was in charge of the agency and that they report to him, according to two people familiar with the document. Yesterday, the DHS general counsel James Percival notified CBP employees to disregard the email because it had not gone through legal review, the people told us.

The split between the two factions is not ideological. Homan and Scott are no less hard-line on border and immigration enforcement than Noem and Lewandowski are. Homan—who was an architect of the family-separation policy during Trump’s first term—wants to ramp up deportations with more ICE officers, detention capacity, and deportation flights, but without the social-media trolling and the show-me-your-papers approach to fishing for deportees in American cities.

Both men worked their way up through the ranks of their agencies. They represent an institutional wing of MAGA that wants to pursue the president’s deportation goals using existing chain-of-command structures and the conventional division of labor, in which the Border Patrol guards the border and ICE handles immigration arrests in U.S. cities, usually aiming to minimize disruption. They also have the backing of many career officials at DHS who told us that they see Noem’s approach as ad hoc, performative, and possibly motivated by her own political ambitions, with Lewandowski pulling the strings. At DHS headquarters in southeast Washington, staffers address Lewandowski as “chief” even though he doesn’t have an actual title there, three current officials told us.

Allies of Noem, meanwhile, have decided that Homan and Scott are bureaucratic dinosaurs who are unable to achieve the president’s objectives. They have tried to satisfy the demands of Miller, who runs immigration policy inside Trump’s orbit and functions as the actual “czar” of the president’s deportation campaign. Miller has set aggressive benchmarks for using the $170 billion in ICE and CBP funding included in Trump’s budget bill last year, telling ICE officials to make 3,000 immigration arrests a day to hit the White House target of 1 million deportations a year. Noem put CBP officials in charge of ICE offices and diverted highly trained investigative agents from trafficking cases and drug cartels to make immigration arrests on city streets.

The killings of Pretti and Renee Good this month have been the two most politically damaging events in a wider, militarized show of force that has turned Trump’s best-polling issue into a political liability. Noem has spent more than $200 million on advertising to promote the deportation campaign, but it has instead been defined largely by images of excess: toddlers being taken into custody, U.S. citizens being yanked from their cars, Bovino’s masked commandos storming a Chicago apartment building after rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter.

[Read: Who wants to work for ICE? They do.]

“Memes don’t win the media narrative. Professionalism does,” a veteran official critical of Noem and her team told us. Another former DHS official told us that Trump’s mass-deportation goals have been held back in the process. “Look at the whole thing playing out in Minnesota,” the former official said. “A lot of the controversy and negative optics could have been avoided—and are avoided in other locations—if not for Corey and the secretary.”

Allies of Homan and Scott believe that a reckoning may be coming. “Lewandowski messed up by going to war with Rodney Scott and deploying Bovino to the interior,” one senior DHS official told us. “There is no one at DHS with higher credentials than Scott, and sidelining him for petty reasons distracts from POTUS missions.”

Critics of Scott who spoke with us argue that he lacks the focus and drive to achieve the president’s priorities, spends too much time in meetings that don’t end in decisions, and is failing to do enough to drive the president’s top priority of finishing the border wall. They say that he had little involvement in the CBP deployment to Minnesota and other cities, and did not visit the state to meet with commanders on the ground until this week. “He is not a team player,” one Homeland Security official told us of Scott. “I really think Rodney is kind of on an island.”

During the meeting with Trump on Monday, Noem spoke at length about her concerns with the slow pace of border-wall construction, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Since the start of Trump’s second term, only about 24 miles of wall have been built, including replacement sections, the person said. Noem has made clear that she holds Scott responsible.

“The president was very focused on the status of the wall,” the official said. “The president is pissed.”

The breakdown that led to this week’s shift inside DHS dates back months. Noem lacks the ability to fire Scott, who was confirmed by the Senate, so she has had to get creative. Late last year, her deputies forced Scott to fire several of his senior staff, moves that were recently reported by the Washington Examiner. Scott’s chief of staff was then promoted, and Noem’s office selected a replacement. After Joseph N. Mazzara, an attorney working in Noem’s office, was installed as CBP deputy commissioner, Scott attempted to reclaim control of his agency.

In a memo sent on January 6, described to us by four people familiar with its contents, Scott asked senior leadership at CBP to report to his office any contact they had with “special government employees”—a request that many interpreted as an effort to curtail the influence of Lewandowski. Within hours, the DHS general counsel James Percival had objected to the memo, as had the White House counsel’s office. A White House official told us that the involvement of the White House counsel followed a normal practice of engaging with general counsels at government departments on “issues of common concern.”

Despite the pushback, Scott’s office issued a second memo later that day to senior CBP officials: They should log any communications with officials outside the agency, including senior DHS and White House officials. Both memos were ultimately rescinded after legal pushback from DHS and the White House counsel, these people told us. Scott’s fumbled attempts to curtail outside influence on his agency raised further concerns at DHS headquarters about his leadership. “You don’t get to this level where you jump on your horse and play cowboy like that,” one person familiar with the events told us.

Days later, Scott found his credibility publicly under attack. Politico reported that top brass in Noem’s office had objected to plans for a $2.1 million office refurbishment at CBP headquarters in Washington. (Renovation questions are known to get the president’s attention. Just days earlier, the Justice Department had launched an investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve and a $2.5 billion renovation he was overseeing.) The Office of Management and Budget, in a move that has not been previously reported, began asking CBP about the plans, exploring whether they violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits spending that contradicts congressional appropriations, according to three people familiar with the outreach.

[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller]

On the same day that the Politico article was published, Miller gathered agency leaders at the White House to discuss the administration’s success in spending funds appropriated with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Scott told those gathered that starting on February 1, wall construction would speed up dramatically. Others in the department doubt he will be able to achieve his new goals.

A veteran official involved with the border-wall project told us that contracting rules imposed by Lewandowski last summer—which require Noem’s signature on any contract or modification exceeding $100,000—have slowed the pace of construction. The funding bill provides nearly $50 billion for the border wall (10 times the amount that triggered a congressional shutdown in late 2018), and the official estimated that more than two-thirds of the contracts are worth $100,000 or more.

Noem’s team says that this is false, contending that she quickly approves contracts and that CBP has not yet awarded all of the prime contracts for construction. “None of this is on Noem,” the DHS official told us.

In recent weeks, DHS officials have discussed hiring a management contractor to oversee the planning and construction of the border wall, replacing senior officials at CBP. The idea has faced some resistance because it would echo an effort undertaken by former President George W. Bush in 2006, when his administration hired Boeing, a defense contractor and commercial-airplane manufacturer, to oversee $2.5 billion in spending on border security. By 2010, CBP’s inspector general was reporting that the agency had failed to properly manage the contract, which was dogged by missed deadlines and cost overruns.

“Adults have arrived.” That’s how one DHS official deployed in Minneapolis described the appearance of Homan and Scott.

Homan began by meeting with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “While we don’t agree on everything, these meetings were a productive starting point and I look forward to more conversations with key stakeholders in the days ahead,” Homan announced on social media afterward. Trump officials have been targeting the two men and other Democratic leaders in the state with a criminal investigation and possible obstruction charges. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, accused them of “terrorism” just two weeks ago.

Administration officials insist that the Minneapolis crackdown will continue, but they have started pulling Border Patrol agents out of the city. Homan is trying to compel Democratic leaders to ease local “sanctuary policies” and give ICE more access to local jails and immigrants with criminal records. Walz and other Minnesota leaders want the government to allow the state to conduct an investigation into Pretti’s killing.

[Read: The truth about ICE’s recruiting push]

Bovino’s return to his old job on the border leaves the administration without a field commander for the rolling conquest of blue cities that has defined its strategy since May. The White House has not clarified whether that approach will continue or whether Homan will now be in charge of the president’s wider removal campaign. But McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, announced that Noem is “very happy” to have Homan take over in Minnesota. “Her portfolio is really huge,” McLaughlin said.

When the 2018 family-separation policy became a political debacle, Trump officials scrambled to distance themselves. The same impulse is again on display. After previously championing Bovino’s efforts in Minnesota, Noem’s team has this week privately pointed to the arrest quotas pushed by Miller at the White House as a cause of the problems. Miller called Pretti an “assassin” within hours of the shooting. But on Tuesday, he suggested that the failure of the CBP team in Minneapolis to follow White House guidance may have played a role in Pretti’s death.

Bovino’s Border Patrol agents were sent to U.S. cities in part because ICE didn’t have enough deportation officers to meet Miller’s goals. But since last summer, Noem has hired 12,000 new officers, agents, and other staff, more than doubling the size of the ICE workforce. Many of those officers are not ready for deployment, but they could hit the streets in full force over the coming months, giving Homan—or whoever is running the deportation campaign—the ability to ramp up ICE arrests in multiple cities at once. Without Bovino in charge, the effort could look very different, and produce even more deportations.