The War Within Homeland Security

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : 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.
58% : 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.
54% : 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.
54% : 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.
52% : Homan urged Minnesota leaders to give ICE more access to detainees in local jails, and said he'd withdraw federal forces if cooperation improves.
52% : " 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.
52% : But since last summer, Noem has hired 12,000 new officers, agents, and other staff, more than doubling the size of the ICE workforce.
51% : Read: Who wants to work for ICE?
50% : 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.
49% : 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.
49% : 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.
48% : 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.
47% : 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.
47% : 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.
47% : 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.
46% : 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.
45% : 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.
45% : 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.
42% : 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.
40% : 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.
39% : Administration officials insist that the Minneapolis crackdown will continue, but they have started pulling Border Patrol agents out of the city.
38% : 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.
38% : 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.
37% : 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.
31% : 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.
30% : 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.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.