Donald Trump’s top immigration official has been removed for failing to arrest enough illegal immigrants.
Caleb Vitello, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was reassigned on Friday.
It came as deportations of migrants have lagged expectations, a senior Trump official said.
Vitello, was in the role in an acting capacity and under pressure to step up enforcement after other top ICE officials were reassigned last week.
President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday
Former ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello
The move was said to have come after frustration within the Trump administration over the speed of deportations.
According to the Department of Homeland Security Vitello will stay at ICE in a different role.
A spokesman told the Wall Street Journal he was ‘actually being elevated so he is no longer in an administrative role.’
Instead, he would be ‘overseeing all field and enforcement operations: finding, arresting, and deporting illegal aliens.’
Vitello is a career official ah had worked with Trump in his first term.
He was the third senior ICE official to be removed this month.
Deportation officials have been given targets of arresting 1,500 illegal migrants a day.
That includes targets of 75 arrests by individual field offices, the wall Street Journal reported.
Trump’s homeland security secretary Kristi Noem is leading the migrant crackdown
Noem will work to boost arrests of illegal migrants
But arrests have lagged being those targets in Trump’s first weeks in office.
Trump recaptured the White House after promising a sweeping immigration crackdown.
His administration has taken an array of steps to ramp up enforcement in coming months.
It plans to replace Vitello with Madison Sheahan, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, a senior Trump official said.
Sheahan worked with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem while she was governor of South Dakota.
Noem is now Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary.
Trump has been frustrated at the speed of deportations
A member of Mexico’s National Guard is on duty at the Migrant Assistance Center, a temporary shelter for receiving Mexicans deported from the United States, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on February 20, 2025.
Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data.
That was far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.
According to a senior official from the Trump administration, deportations are expected to increase in the coming months as President Trump creates new opportunities to intensify arrests and expulsions.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Biden-era deportation numbers appeared ‘artificially high’ because of higher levels of illegal immigration.
Trump campaigned for the White House promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants in the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.
Yet initial figures suggest he could struggle to match higher deportation rates during the last full year of the Biden administration.
Migrants turn themselves in to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers after crossing over a section of border wall into the U.S.
In that year large numbers of migrants were caught crossing illegally, making them easier to deport.
The deportation campaign is expected to gain momentum in the next few months, supported by agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica to accept deportees from other countries.
U.S. military personnel have so far assisted in more than a dozen military deportation flights to Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and India.
The Trump administration has also flown Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay.
Trump said in late January that his administration would prepare to detain up to 30,000 migrants there despite pushback from civil liberties groups.
