Trump loyalists across Homeland Security could hinder Biden’s immigration policies
WASHINGTON» After a Texas judge last week temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s order to pause deportations for 100 days, immigration agents did not hesitate to use the brief window to break with the incoming president’s new tone.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents moved a 40year-old Cameroonian asylumseeker to a facility in Louisiana and prepared to deport him, despite his claims of torture in his home country.
“This is not what the Biden administration stands for,” Henry Hollithron, the man’s lawyer, said in an interview. “That is definitely a holdover from the Trump era.”
President Donald Trump often complained about what he called a “deep state” inside the government working to thwart his agenda. But Biden and his secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, are encountering their own pockets of internal resistance, especially at the agencies charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, where the gung-ho culture has long favored the get-tough policies that Trump embraced.
Mayorkas, who was confirmed Tuesday after a nearly two-week delay by Republicans unhappy about his immigration views, will find a Department of Homeland Security transformed since he was its deputy secretary in Barack Obama’s administration. Liberal immigration activists and former Trump administration officials rarely agree on much, but both parties say Mayorkas will struggle to get buy-in for Biden’s immigration agenda from the thousands of border and immigration agents in his 240,000-person department.
“There are people in ICE that agree with Trump’s policies,” said Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner who served as Trump’s ICE director. “They want to do the job they took an oath to do.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel of the American Immigration Council, which advocates on behalf of immigrants, agreed that after “four years of a newly empowered and politicized workforce,” ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents are “more likely to push back against an incoming administration than in the past.”
Biden campaigned on bringing accountability to the government’s immigration agencies, but he is facing a daunting challenge in overhauling a department that was unmatched in how closely it aligned with Trump.
Videos celebrating Trump’s “big, beautiful” border wall are still featured on the Customs and Border Protection website. A fictionalized video by the agency that shows Trump’s depiction of migrants as feared criminals is still on the Border Patrol’s official social media channels. And the union representing ICE agents — whose top leaders were enthusiastic supporters of Trump — has signaled that it does not intend to accept all of the new administration’s reversals of his policies.
Those agents may have gotten a lift in the waning days of Trump’s administration, when Trump loyalists tried to codify the influence of those unions. The day before Biden’s inauguration, union leaders signed a labor agreement with Kenneth Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner and the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that requires ICE’s political leadership to consult with the union on policy decisions.
“They are not going to be able to get people to change their deeply held convictions,” Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, said of many career officials at the Homeland Security Department. “They are going to make painfully clear to the politicals
what the consequences are going to be if their advice is not followed.” Miller, a staunch defender of Trump, has criticized Biden’s policies publicly even before the inauguration.
The emergence of an emboldened resistance inside the Biden administration is not limited to the Homeland Security agencies. Pockets of government employees loyal to Trump and his agenda remain ensconced in other parts of the bureaucracy.
But not everyone in the sprawling department will reject the new approach.
Some officials in the Homeland Security Department grew frustrated at the revolving door of acting leadership within the agencies under Trump’s administration. And one division of ICE that investigates longerterm cases into traffickers and terrorists even asked to separate from the immigration agency so it would not be connected to Trump’s effort to crack down on immigrants.