A former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff has claimed that federal immigration agents “don’t know what they’re doing” and “should be focusing on real criminals.”
Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the department who blew the whistle on President Donald Trump’s first administration in a tell-all op-ed, criticized the administration’s sweeping immigration operation that has seen thousands of federal agents reassigned from normal duties to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Taylor claimed that after the last two chaotic years under Trump, where deportation surges have resulted in the killings of American citizens, it would “take a generation for people to trust the department again.”
“Those agents need to be out there investigating spies, terrorists, pedophile rings,” Taylor said in a Thursday interview with NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. “The agents themselves will confess to people like me. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
In order to meet Trump’s deportation targets of removing 1 million people a year - a goal set by his deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller - Homeland Security diverted resources from units working on tackling terrorism, trafficking, and child abuse to focus on arresting illegal immigrants instead.
Republicans also gave ICE about $75 billion to hire new agents and create new detention facilities in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Trump signed last year.
Taylor cited a recent case of a 23-year-old Colombian asylum-seeker detained by ICE at San Francisco International Airport as she waited to catch a flight to Oregon on vacation.
“This isn’t what they should be doing,” Taylor said. “They should be focusing on real criminals.”
“At this point, I think the trust is so bad at DHS, you almost have to tear the department down to the studs and rebuild it,” he added
The Independent has contacted Homeland Security for comment.
Following the Republican wipeout in the midterm elections, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin vowed, “Deportations will continue” in a social media post.
“365 days per year, the hardworking men and women of ICE law enforcement are targeting and arresting criminal illegal aliens to make America safe again—this includes on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Election Day,” he followed up in another post.
Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, was severely mocked for a post on Election Day where she claimed, “We were too successful the first year of the Trump administration” as Republican losses came in thick and fast.
“I’ve worked with every U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. You were, by a wide margin, the worst,” Taylor replied to Noem on X.
Taylor, a veteran of multiple Republican administrations, was targeted by Trump last year and accused of “espionage and treason” for writing a tell-all book about his time in the first administration. Taylor wrote that Trump posed a serious risk to national security during his first term and was an even bigger threat to democracy if he were reelected.
The White House accused Taylor of publishing “falsehoods and fabricated stories.”
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