The Department of Homeland Security scrambled to reverse course Saturday after ICE officers across the country received verbal orders to stop arresting illegal immigrants without criminal records — a directive that sparked immediate political backlash once exposed.
Within hours of The Daily Wire’s reporting, ICE gave officers the green light to resume arresting illegal immigrants regardless of criminal history.
A White House official confirmed that some ICE officers did receive the verbal guidance to halt arrests of non-criminals, contradicting DHS’s initial claim that the reports were “false.”
“No one is off the table for arrests. ICE has commenced a nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities targeting criminal illegal aliens — many released from jails by sanctuary politicians — including murderers, rapists, child predators, and gang members.”
Scott Mechkowski, a former ICE New York field office deputy director, said the confusion stemmed from a bungled internal communication — not a genuine policy shift.
“This was not a policy change, and anyone reporting it that way is getting it wrong,” Mechkowski said. “Somebody in communications pushed out guidance without understanding how ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] actually operates, and it got garbled on the way to the field.”
The retired ICE official explained the agency intended to make criminal arrests a priority, not to stop arresting illegal immigrants without rap sheets entirely.
“Here’s how it works … our state and local partners do their jobs every day,” Mechkowski said. “If they encounter an illegal alien, that person gets processed. That never stopped.”
“Separately, ICE officers carry dockets, and a lot of those files are criminal aliens. The guidance was meant to tell those officers to work their criminal cases first. Prioritize, not quit. There’s a big difference, and whoever wrote it didn’t grasp that. It was corrected within a day,” he said.
John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under the Obama administration, echoed that the directive could have resulted from miscommunication during the chain-of-command rollout.
“A lot of times when the guidance is kicked out to the field, there’s a desire within ICE to simplify it and make it as unambiguous as possible … maybe the message was, ‘hey, we need to make sure we’re really focusing as well on the criminal population’ and somehow by the time it ends up down in the field, that comes out to don’t touch any non-criminals,” Sandweg said.
The guidance bore a striking resemblance to a Biden-era memo that instructed ICE to prioritize arrests of illegal immigrants with serious criminal records, Alex Howard, a Biden DHS spokesman, said.
“The principle of the [Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas memo was simple: ICE has broader legal authority than it has resources, so you prioritize the highest-risk cases,” Howard said. “The policies aren’t identical, but it’s striking that this administration appears to have briefly moved toward that same concept before quickly reaffirming broader enforcement after the guidance became public and drew Republican pushback.”
Howard argued DHS is now doing damage control because “there’s an election in 36 days.”
Sandweg also pointed to the upcoming midterm election, saying the Trump administration is threading a delicate needle to avoid alienating voters while maintaining its tough-on-immigration brand.
“Obviously, we’re in a midterm cycle. It certainly sounds to me that there’s some elements probably concerned about the impact of immigration enforcement right now, in terms of widespread arrests of non-criminal targets right now,” Sandweg said.
“Maybe you have some members of Congress who are in tough races calling and saying ‘hey, this is hurting me.’ But at the same time, the administration doesn’t want to be seen as abandoning aggressive immigration enforcement or walking anything back,” he said.
Luis Miranda, a former DHS official now working as a political strategist, dismissed the miscommunication explanation outright.
“There was already reporting that ICE has been quietly having to fire unqualified hires, and failed to account for long-term costs in a massive detention center shopping spree that wasted tens of millions of dollars on facilities they won’t use,” Miranda said.
“So this isn’t a communication breakdown; it’s likely a conflict between career law enforcement trying to focus resources and a White House’s political lackeys wanting to treat everything like a reality television circus,” he added.
The episode echoed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s decision to briefly halt ICE traffic stops over the summer after two fatal incidents in Maine and Texas.
When President Donald Trump learned of that change, he quickly ordered the restoration of traffic stops.
