Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who have worked together side by side for two decades are increasingly at odds in a battle to see who can better carry out President Donald Trump’s deportation operation.
Over the weekend, top Trump administration officials made the decision to purge high-ranking ICE officials and install Border Patrol managers in their place. In addition, Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks disclosed to the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview this month that his agents are now deployed across at least 27 cities carrying out immigration enforcement.
ICE employees are not happy about any of it, feeling replaced and exhausted from the past nine months. Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents are ecstatic, according to four sources.
The first source, who has a keen sense of how the workforce is handling the changes, warned that morale among ICE’s 6,500 officers is declining due to the infusion of outside employees and leaders.
A second person affiliated with ICE said Border Patrol agents are not going to have a major impact on arrests despite the Trump administration’s new reliance on them in an effort to increase arrests.
Department of Homeland Security officials think “Border Patrol agents are going to come in there and make a difference,” one source said. “That’s not the truth. Border Patrol just comes in more heavy-handed. They don’t make more arrests, but they make more headlines.”
Border Patrol’s arrival in places such as Chicago and Portland, Oregon, has made headlines due to its agents’ more aggressive approach to protecting federal facilities from protesters and in how they are nabbing people who attempt to interfere with their work.
Those who spoke with the Washington Examiner were concerned that the flashiness of it all was why Border Patrol was suddenly in demand while maintaining that ICE was simply exhausted, overwhelmed, or doing the best it could.
A third person, a Border Patrol agent recently deployed to a major U.S. city to assist ICE, said he had not seen one ICE employee after more than a week on the ground there, causing him to question where ICE is and what its officers are doing.
The fourth person, a former senior Border Patrol official, said Border Patrol is not only capable of doing ICE’s job but also eager to do it because agents believe ICE is, in fact, slacking.
“Many of us have never been happy with ICE as partners,” the former official said. “You saw what the last four years for us was like. The perception is that they are always dragging their feet. They weren’t good team players.”
Although employees of both government agencies have similar responsibilities, Border Patrol agents are stationed at the southern, northern, and coastal borders to guard against people or goods that come in between the land ports of entry.
ICE officers from its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm are inside the United States, where they arrest and detain illegal immigrants. They also accompany illegal immigrants ordered by a judge to be deported on flights to their countries of origin.
The first person added that ICE’s rank-and-file employees are not happy to see their leaders replaced, and they believe that nothing they do can measure up to the demands of the Trump administration.
The former senior Border Patrol official noted that while he and others generally view ICE as underperforming, he does not believe that Border Patrol agents should be taken from their jobs to assist.
“I categorically 100% disagree with Border Patrol agents being deployed to the interior, doing the job of ICE ERO because we have our own mission that is suffering as a result,” the official said. “I’m not a fan of the way that it’s going down.”
ICE has been pushed by the administration again and again since January to arrest more illegal immigrants, but the agency has not been able to meet the 3,000-per-day threshold thrust upon it by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller in May.
Three current and former senior ICE officials told the Washington Examiner earlier this year that ICE’s inability to hit those numbers was due in part to laziness among officers and simply the lack of manpower to arrest people and resources to detain and remove them. The comments validated what Border Patrol agents have complained about while underscoring the tensions between the two agencies.
“We all know that they are not meeting expectations. Some of it is atrophy. Some of it is lack of funding/jail space,” one official previously wrote in a text message, adding that ICE officers “need to be better.”
In one example, the official said he had heard of instances of ICE officers temporarily assigned to metropolitan areas to help existing officers arrest illegal immigrants being “more interested in checking out local sights than doing the work.”
“These guys — it’s hard for them to step up and meet this moment because they’re just not that good,” the same person said.
A second official said ICE officers making arrests have pushed back on having to accompany illegal immigrants on transport rides and flights to detention facilities, describing the tasks as menial and redundant.
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The passage this summer of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was expected to boost operations with an infusion of cash to double ICE detention space from 50,000 beds to 100,000.
Although DHS officials said this week that they anticipate reaching 600,000 deportations by January 2026, it is short of Trump’s goal of 1 million.
