Politics

“According to two sources who spoke with the attendees,” NBC News reported, Miller at one point was “threatening to fire the leaders of the field offices who post the bottom 10% of arrest figures monthly.” (NBC News has reached out to Miller for comment.)

In the same meeting, which was first reported by Axios, Miller set a new quota for ICE’s 25 field offices: 3,000 arrests per day. He confirmed that mandate in a Fox News appearance Wednesday, calling the figure a “minimum” and promising that Trump would “keep pushing to get that number up higher and higher each and every single day.” That new target is already double the quota from January, when each field office was charged with making 75 arrests per day, or roughly 1,200 to 1,500 in total.

Miller’s rant also indicated that ICE’s already expansive efforts weren’t enough to meet the Trump administration’s unofficial goal of 1 million deportees in its first year. NBC News reported that he “told attendees to look more broadly than immigrants who have committed crimes and to arrest noncriminal migrants anywhere they encounter them as well.” It’s exactly the kind of widened net that I predicted in January when the administration first began stripping migrants of their parole or temporary protected status, an ongoing effort that has left more than a million foreign-born people facing potential removal.