Anna Giaritelli has covered immigration and the border for the Washington Examiner since 2018. In the last two years, I’ve found her reporting invaluable for understanding the Department of Homeland Security, including the campaign by Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski to push out the head of Customs and Border Protection, why the admin’s approach to publicity on immigration has whiplashed so hard, and the border wall contracts stuck on Noem’s desk.
We taped a week before the midterm elections. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Shadrach Strehle for their support in producing this episode.
Anna, describe the arc of this administration’s approach to immigration policy.
Anyone from either side would admit that Trump came in incredibly strongly with his executive actions. They took four years and planned the heck out of what they were going to do on immigration — so different from his first term. They tried to set themselves up for this massive deportation push you’ve never seen before. That continues. In the background, they’ve cut legal immigration by historic amounts.
Immigration is a huge issue, but it’s in the background now. Unless you have a fatal shooting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it doesn’t bounce back up. Regular people are more concerned with affordability, data centers, all those other things.
In the first few months, you have a bunch of executive orders on immigration. The CBP One app is shut down. Very quickly, the Alien Enemies Act flights to El Salvador start. In May, you covered a meeting where Stephen Miller pushed very hard for a quota. Why a quota?
As soon as Trump took over, we were seeing hundreds of people arrested every day. It was definitely a jump from the Biden administration, but not a huge one. Within ICE, there are two sides: the investigations side, Homeland Security Investigations, and the enforcement side, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) — the people who arrest, detain, and remove illegal immigrants. Miller brought the 25 leaders of each side into DC from the field. He and Kristi Noem, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sat them down and said, screaming, “You are going to hit 3,000 a day. Whatever you have to do — round them up.” That’s over a million a year. “We’re looking for the worst of the worst, but also go to Home Depot. If they look like they shouldn’t be in the country, see if they should be in the country.”
Obama set the record for removals, about 400,000 [in a year]. We’ve certainly passed that under President Trump. But it was a very blatant message, and we’ve seen those types of meetings again and again. The White House yells at them, goes quiet, then a few months later we see it happen again.
On immigration specifically, the administration came in with a bunch of policy ideas pre-baked over the previous four years, and a clear intention of not repeating the lack of policy preparedness. What’s happening that means people like Miller and Noem feel they have to make these course corrections, given all that planning?
Let’s look back at what went wrong in the first term. There was no focus on interior immigration enforcement; it was all the border. I did a story in Trump’s first term that said he hadn’t put up a mile of new border wall 30 months in. He tweeted it. He was pissed, because he’s the builder-in-chief.
Several months after Trump took office in 2017, we saw the border numbers creeping back up, because they hadn’t actually changed anything. What they learned this time around was, “We want to focus on the border in every way possible, but we also want to go just as hard in the interior.”
People like Stephen Miller are philosophically in line with President Trump. He sees the president’s goals and how he believes he can get the country there. People like Kristi Noem are not Stephen Millers. They’re there for the ride, to glean what they can out of it. I don’t think Secretary Noem was as interested in actually hitting those numbers. We saw what she was interested in: the contracts — and who they were paid out to, which is now being looked into — the glamor, the flights, the planes.
So you have fractures. This is the background story of DHS and the White House now: different people trying to steer the ship toward what they want over immigration enforcement.
Say a little more about Noem’s motivations. Folks on the right who care about enforcing a very strict line on immigration have been focused on this for a bit. Readers who favor a less restrictive immigration policy may not have followed the saga as closely.
The first day she addressed DHS in Washington, she walked out to a country song with fairly explicit lyrics, called “Hot Mama.” That’s who Kristi Noem is at the end of the day. She was in it for the clout. She was there because Corey Lewandowski — the man she’s alleged to have been having an affair with, who she brought to DHS — was Trump’s former campaign manager. She’s not a policy person. She’s a former congresswoman who became a governor, and she was in the right place at the right time.
You could look at her alliance with Greg Bovino, who led these crazy Border Patrol operations in various cities, and say, “They want to deport as many people as possible.” But her lack of law enforcement background, and the lack of input from people who actually understand enforcement, suggest it was all for show. Kristi Noem was unserious about what she was doing.
Readers will remember Greg Bovino as the man overseeing the Minneapolis operations in which two American citizens were shot. Where does he come in?
Over six months, we looked at four people and their connections to one another: Kristi Noem; Corey Lewandowski; Greg Bovino, who was a regional Border Patrol chief; and Mike Banks, who was the head of Border Patrol. Those folks are all interconnected. They worked together to keep each other in their jobs. Border Patrol has about 20 regions across the country — northern border, coastal, and southern — each with a chief. Some have 100 agents; some have a couple thousand. Bovino oversaw agents in southeastern California, in the El Centro area. He has a history of getting in trouble, came from New Orleans previously, and will say what has to get done. He’s very Trump-like in that sense.
Border Patrol is under Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a 70,000-person agency. Over CBP you have DHS. Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski didn’t like the career people at CBP, so they reached down, went around CBP, and started working with the people who — I don’t know how they made contact with Kristi and Corey. They created this alliance to go around Rodney Scott, who’s still the head of CBP, and other people in that agency, in order to bring Greg out from the middle of nowhere, California, put him on the streets of Los Angeles, and then send him into Minneapolis and Chicago to do these missions alongside ICE. He had no boss. He wasn’t reporting to the head of Border Patrol. He was reporting directly to Kristi Noem, and that’s where they started to get into a lot of trouble.
What was the nature of the conflict between the political leadership at DHS — Noem and co. — and the leadership of CBP?
The disagreements were about CBP’s role in assisting ICE, and how ICE should be doing its job. CBP has jurisdiction to go into the country and enforce immigration laws. There’s this whole thing about having to be within 100 miles of the border, but that’s only for certain things. They can be in Colorado and enforce immigration law. They just don’t get additional measures and protections if they’re that far in.
The issue was, ICE is choking. It can’t get the job done. They’re like, “Let’s send in CBP. It’s a far bigger agency. Let’s send in Border Patrol and customs officers — pull them from the airports.” No one was working together. ICE is saying, “We’re going to arrest these people in Chicago today.” CBP gets there with Greg Bovino, and they’re like, “We’re just going to walk the streets. We’re going to go to the Home Depot parking lot and rough up some people, take some names, and arrest people if we find anyone.” They’re also trying to do some of the criminal stuff: “We’re going to help ICE. We know who to look for.” But there was no coordination, and ICE resented that, because the ICE officers were saying, “You think we can’t do our job?”
Border Patrol blames ICE for so much of the border crisis. People are coming over the border, and Border Patrol’s job is not to find a place for them. It’s to apprehend them, detain them for less than three days, theoretically, then transfer them to ICE, or remove them if they can. Under Biden, ICE had said, “We can’t hold these people,” so they were just letting people out. Border Patrol looked at ICE and said, “You guys aren’t doing anything. You’ve created five million people in the country who came under Biden. ICE can’t fix this. We’ve got to go out and help.”
It’s also about the level of force, because Bovino was very aggressive. There is a way to be federal law enforcement: to enforce legitimate warrants and arrest people who are in the country illegally, or are suspected of being in the country illegally. That’s where things started getting out of control.
When you talked to rank-and-file folks in CBP or ICE, what were they hoping to see in the first few months of the administration?
They wanted to see the border completely shut down compared to where it was. They did see and continue to see that. When I interviewed the former head of Border Patrol, Mike Banks, he said, “We want to get out there and fix what ICE did. To arrest all these people we were forced to let go to ICE, who were released into the country.”
The rank and file, as you describe it, had a sense of, “Finally, we can do our jobs again.” The political leadership, Miller and co., was motivated to make that happen. What was the disconnect in those first months, when you had an incredibly public fight over immigration, a bunch of showy moves from the administration, and a lot of frustration about actually executing?
There were and continue to be two big issues. There were way too few officers to go after as many as you want to go after: you had 13 million people who potentially could be deported and 6,500 ICE officers to carry out arrests and deportations. And the Trump administration put itself in a bad place by promising, “We’re going after the worst of the worst.” Now you’ve confused not just your base, but even Democrats and liberals, who are saying, “Everyone who doesn’t have a criminal history will be fine.”
Now you have this fight on the right: are we going after everyone, or just some people? That continues. I get more messages from ICE officers about that than anything else: “We don’t know who we’re supposed to go after. Are we arresting everybody, or just people with criminal histories?” You see that within the Trump base. It’s a lack of personnel to actually do it, and confusion over who we’re supposed to be arresting.
Some of the argument I heard from the administration for these big, showy, Bovino-style raids in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc, was that they wanted to convince people to self-deport. This was a big message from Kristi Noem. She cut ads telling people, in Spanish, not to make the government come and find them. You’ve covered the administration’s numbers on how many people have self-deported pretty critically.
Has the strategy worked?
I don’t know if we’ll ever know. As of earlier this year, DHS has said, “We’ve forced 1.8 million, almost 2 million, to self-deport.” Is that the latest?
The range I’ve seen is 1.6 to 2.2 million.
I have emailed DHS so many times: “How do you know this?” They’re like, “We’re the government, we know.” There’s a chart that came out earlier this year that said the foreign-born population declined under Trump. But that includes legal and illegal, so is that what they’re counting? DHS has not given an explanation to date. You’d think if this was a great victory, they’d want to say, “Here are the details.”
But you’re right: the things Bovino did, in line with Kristi Noem, were very Trump style. It wasn’t illogical. It was: “This is what’s coming for you. You see these guys with massive guns, and boats coming down the river in Chicago,” which was odd, of all things, “and they’re coming to take you and your children away.” We can’t quantify the effect, but it has certainly had some impact.
One other strategic approach was to staff up these agencies. How has that gone?
DHS has seen record numbers of people applying to Border Patrol, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard — which is a military branch under DHS — and ICE. Border Patrol and ICE alone had a quarter of a million applications — they claim. They were looking to hire 10,000 at ICE in addition to the 6,500 ERO officers, and they have swiftly onboarded them. The debate has been: at what cost? Are you choosing people to hire and lowering the standards to get them through? The idea was: “We got the One Big Beautiful Bill money in July 2025, move as quickly as possible to expand detention, because we’re about to put all these officers on the street, arrest people, and we need somewhere to hold them.” You’re expanding everything simultaneously.
I’ve toured ICE’s training center in Brunswick, Georgia. The standards are being lowered. Spanish isn’t required anymore. Okay. The other thing I hear from ICE officers is that some tenured officers are quitting because the demand is too much. They’ve seen normal demand, and they’re like, “We can’t do two more years of this.” They’re saying these new hires being put out with them haven’t even done basic collision driving or how to do traffic stops. There are all these fundamentals they’re not learning, and then they get put on the street with a badge and a gun. It’s no coincidence that we’re seeing these fatal altercations, because these guys don’t know what they’re doing, and the tenured officers on the street next to them are liable for what happens when they’re out there together. That’s a story we’re going to pursue very soon. We’re not imagining that ICE has gotten more aggressive and that there are more problems. There really are.
Minneapolis, about a year ago now, makes interior immigration enforcement the biggest political story in the US for a couple of months, and it culminates in Kristi Noem being forced out. After the Good and Pretti shootings, what led to Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino all exiting?
During the shootings, I put out a story about the head of CBP, Rodney Scott, and the horrific ways Noem and Lewandowski had tried to take him out of his position. They can’t fire him because he’s Senate confirmed — they did it through back channels. They had him fire all of his senior career staff — a dozen people were pushed out, some of them sent across the country to agencies they’d never worked in. These are career CBP people with families. They installed three new people at CBP who were there specifically to monitor what was going on under Scott. Everyone always says, “You must have gotten your story from Rodney Scott.” Mr. Scott would not talk to me during this period. He was so scared about just hanging on. They wanted him to quit. That’s the goal: make his life so miserable he quits.
This ladders back up to debates over the way you enforce in the interior?
Corey Lewandowski got into a bickering thing with Rodney Scott over something Scott had said at the very beginning. Rodney was confirmed in summer 2025. Kristi Noem was coming in. They were at a meeting and they said something inappropriate, along the lines of, “Here’s how we’re going to use DHS and do X, Y, Z.” And I believe Rodney said, “That’s not how it works.” To career people who’ve been in law enforcement for 20 or 30 years, just because you’re a political doesn’t mean you get to do things that are illegal.
It was a bit of a personality thing, especially because Corey Lewandowski has no background in homeland security. Kristi Noem is at least a former congresswoman. But then it became about the policy: how far are you going to put CBP at risk because of everything you’re asking them to do, when they still have this mission on the border? It’s not like we fixed the border. What do we do? How do we get ready for 2029?
Is Minneapolis the tipping point, both for the public and for Kristi Noem’s role?
Yes. We were already seeing how the Noem administration was trying to get rid of people within DHS who opposed it. Minneapolis happens, and you see that this isn’t good for how CBP is working with ICE. There need to be some bigger questions. Tom Homan intervened and took the same approach as Rodney Scott. Then we see how Kristi Noem was responding to the questions. I think it was the same day as one of the shootings. She said this was justified, the guy was a terrorist. Then she says CBP told her this, so she’s throwing DHS personnel under the bus for what they told her. Under oath, she’s testifying before the House and Senate, and she’s accused of infidelity, and of misspending over $200 million in taxpayer funds on private jets and contracts. It happened so fast, which is the craziest thing when I talk to people across DHS about this. It took months of building, and thinking, “This is never going to end.” Then all of a sudden, she threw the president under the bus and said he had approved things he hadn’t approved, and it went like that.
Senator John Kennedy, Republican from Louisiana, was the one who put that line of questions to her: whether she had gotten the president’s sign-off on ads that featured her very prominently. That was widely seen as the tipping point, because it made the boss look bad.
Was that trap set by the senator as a result of the cluster in Minneapolis?
Kennedy’s an interesting senator. He’s pretty loyal, but he’ll say it when it needs to be said, and if that pisses someone off, it happens. But it was wild to see a Republican lay the trap and her fall into it. We know how politics works. We saw what happened with Katie Zacharia: Susie Wiles set up the Hannity interview that destroyed her — or she destroyed herself.
I don’t know what happened behind the scenes — if his staff was involved. But the thing is, staff see this. I’ve heard from so many House and Senate staffers throughout this entire process, particularly in the House Homeland Security Committee, saying, “This is really bad, but our members can’t do anything, so what do we do?” They’re trying to get ahead and move forward. But it was Kennedy, of all people — the videos went viral. Until this point, everyone knew, “Kristi Noem, she’s got big extensions and eyelashes.” But nobody had understood: Is she corrupt? What is she really doing? When you put the $200 million out there with that line of questioning, and then the infidelity stuff that got asked about in the House hearing, it was just enough to make her a real problem for the White House.
This story cuts against one of the ways that Republicans and contemporary conservatives talk about control of the government. When I interviewed Russ Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, in 2024, he emphasized, “The big change that needs to happen, relative to Trump 1, is politicals with more authority directly from the president” — installing political leadership that could “ride herd” on the agencies and the departments. You got that here at DHS.
There are so many examples of that. CBP won’t even respond to an email I send about something basic, because they have to have DHS sign off on it — and I’m at a right-leaning media organization. You see it so expansively. You have very few people across DHS who control everything, and the same with other departments.
One of the most striking examples to me was your reporting that any contract over $100,000 had to go up to Kristi Noem herself for sign-off. One reason for delays was that these contracts were sitting on her desk.
You really have followed a lot of my reporting. I’m impressed. That was a policy implemented very quickly after Secretary Noem took office, for the sake of vetting all of the contracts: we don’t want to waste any money. DHS issues a massive number of contracts, in billions of dollars. It’s not far off from the Department of War. They’re doing really big stuff. To say the secretary herself is going to look over these contracts — even if she had staff vetting them before giving them to her — is an absurd amount of work to put on her.
What we ended up seeing was stuff like border wall funding wasn’t getting through. When I looked into it, it was sitting on the secretary’s desk unsigned for a number of weeks. The following day, Corey Lewandowski tweeted at me saying I was lying and didn’t know what I was doing. Later that day, Secretary Noem posted a picture of her signing the border wall contract she had allegedly signed weeks earlier. This is the irony: you have very few people overseeing everything, the politicals, who aren’t getting the job done.
The same thing happened in the first months at the Department of Commerce with Howard Lutnick, and there was similar reporting. Commerce is a sprawling institution, so he had contracts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration bottlenecked, and all kinds of minor contracts. The exact same coverage came up: these things aren’t politically salient or challenging; they’re normal implementation work, and they were sitting on the cabinet secretary’s desk. On Statecraft, we’ve talked about the debate over whether politicals should get to fully govern the agencies they run, for example, in discussing Nixon’s White House in April.
These have been the two salient cases where, by the administration’s own lights, that model of governance has had more challenges than you’d expect.
I completely agree. This gets into what happened recently with Corey Lewandowski getting into some legal trouble with the Justice Department, which I knew about weeks ago and didn’t scoop. I hate myself now.
My colleague reported yesterday that Corey Lewandowski is the subject of a referral to the Justice Department. The matter surrounds potential abuse of his position, and Mr. Lewandowski has denied wrongdoing.
It goes back to: why would you need a cap on $100,000 contracts? That’s a great idea. We should evaluate everything. This administration has taken a strong approach to fraud [as Statecraft has discussed with Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management]. But we’ve seen cases where the contracts were being given to friends of family, friends of friends, and overpaid by millions of dollars. If you were verifying every contract was necessary, why were they going to people you knew who had no business doing DHS work before? The question is, will the Trump administration turn on itself enough to throw one or two of them to the wolves? How far will they go?
How different is Markwayne Mullin‘s approach at DHS from Kristi Noem’s?
They used to go on family trips together. I haven’t reported that, but I can tell you. A number of years ago they were very close. They’re from similar parts of the country, with similar values — similar claimed values. When Mullin came in, the agencies I was speaking with were all bracing to see what he would do. Everyone I’ve spoken with has been stunned by his desire to learn, and his desire to let people do the jobs they do and influence his decisions.
Under Noem, we were seeing, “Don’t ask questions. This is what we’re doing.” So much so that after the Minneapolis shootings, DHS all of a sudden directs CBP to begin looking into building a border wall throughout the Big Bend National Park region — where Border Patrol agents have said for years, “We don’t need a wall.” DHS suddenly decides — this is what I was told — they’re trying to get a victory: “Look, we’re going to put a wall up here. This is great. Look away from Minneapolis, look south.”
With Mullin, there’s been such a different approach. People feel they can speak with him, and you have the agencies carrying out their responsibilities without someone sitting on their shoulders all the time. Mullin is like Kristi Noem — they were lawmakers, but they don’t have the background that others at DHS have. It’s been a learning experience, but he seems to have taken a humbler approach to really learning, and then steering the ship.
The last thing I want to ask you about is the numbers. Three thousand a day was the stretch target Stephen Miller pushed very hard in the middle of last year, and to my knowledge it hasn’t been hit at any point since. Is it a feasible target, or was it always wishcasting?
If we had 6,500 ICE officers, I would say no. If we had 16,000 — they say they hired 12,000 on top of the 6,500, but we also know several thousand have quit — even with help from CBP, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI, 3,000’s insane, especially because of the way ICE goes after people.
I’ve gone out with them. I remember this one time in California, we mustered together at 4 a.m. They said, “We’re going after these six people today.” There were six ICE, and then me. They ended up arresting, I think it was, three people that day. It took them probably seven or eight hours of being out trying to find people. Six of them arrested three people in a day’s work, and then they have to do the processing and booking. When you look at the numbers of, say, 10,000 ICE officers, it’s not plausible. That’s when they’re trying to put on a show, because they have a reporter with them: “We want to make sure we have targets we can get today.” In this climate, especially in certain states and cities that are so unfriendly, ICE can’t just go in with a few officers. They’re going in with so many officers for security, and only two or three are going to be responsible for apprehending that person, if they can get them out of the house.
The only way they can really increase that is what Tom Homan has said from the beginning, before the administration started — he hasn’t gone back and forth on it, but the White House has: collateral arrests. When you arrest a driver, you know this is the person you’re looking for. He’s going to work. He has a criminal history. He’s got three people in the car. Normally, they would say, “Let them go.” But under Trump, we’ve seen back and forth on “Should we also take in these three other people who happen to be in the country illegally?” That’s how you’re boosting your numbers to hit those thresholds.
When you talk to sources in Border Patrol who want to enforce the law vigorously, what’s worked best over the last 18 months and where have they felt the biggest gap between expectation and reality?
They’ve carried out the mission they want to carry out well when they do it quietly: when they’re not parading through the streets, or pushing intense social media posts from government accounts, or even from officials like Bovino, because that angers people and makes them want to get involved. If you’re really interested in arresting people and carrying out this deportation operation, you need to go in, keep your head down, shut up, and get the job done. But at the same time, you can also influence people to self-deport by putting that in their face. It’s tricky as far as messaging.
When I talked to folks in DC about the state of play in January 2025, their sense of why it was so important to put on a show was that this was a winning issue. Trump was elected with immigration as one of his best issues. You had supermajorities of Americans in favor of more deportations — in retrospect, a high-water mark, at least in the last few years, for public support of a very aggressive immigration policy. The argument I often heard was, “This will sell well. This is exactly what the American people voted for.” It’s an interesting question whether that was strategically incorrect — whether you had to resist the idea that this would play well on camera, because of course it did not.
You’re so right. We did a story a few weeks ago about how the border is in the quietest shape it’s been in six decades: why aren’t Republicans talking about this? Someone said to me, “The president read your story and was very upset.” I said, “Why?” They said, “Because he doesn’t understand why Republicans aren’t messaging about this.” I said, “I’m glad the story was valid.”
Whether you’re looking at the border or the interior, the results are incredible, and I say that as a reporter. It’s black and white. To not hear them talking about that, or immigration — “It’s campaign season; we don’t want to talk about it” — doesn’t make sense. The same with crime: they were talking so much about illegal immigrant crime and public safety. Why the heck aren’t you reminding people, “Crime is down. This is different”?
One answer would be that the administration poisoned the well. Now when you think about immigration, you don’t think about the Biden years; you think about the last two years of enforcement, and some incredibly high-profile examples of ICE agents running wild. The salience backfired.
It’s similar to Trump 1.0: “We’ve got to secure the border.” People pretty much agree with that overwhelmingly. Then they start separating families in 2018, and all of a sudden it’s, “Nope. We don’t want to talk about that,” because the public realizes it doesn’t like seeing families separated. “We don’t like seeing ICE running through communities doing this.”
I’m so curious to know what the next two years are going to look like, because ICE still doesn’t have a leader — it hasn’t for almost 15 years now. It’s pretty much a White House official who’s calling the shots over there, with Tom Homan behind him. This should have been the easiest operation to take care of. They should have known exactly what they were doing, and I don’t think they realize they’re still fumbling.
