Last month’s Axios story about Trump Reichsminister of Racial Purity Stephen Miller screaming at an all hands meeting of ICE officials was good, but it lacked any really specific detail from inside the room. Luckily right wing outlet the Washington Examiner have now stepped up to fill those gaps.
Very thoroughly, to the point where one might wonder if the Examiner’s agenda fully lines up with that of the Trump Regime. “They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals. That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid… There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized,” said one source. Again this at ICE, not the freaking CDC or you name whatever other “woke” agency currently getting gutted, where the frontline America First stormtroopers fear they’re being spied on by the White House.
The first sign of trouble came when top 50 field officials summoned to the “emergency” meeting with just about a week’s notice of the May 20th meeting: 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI. Not at all a coincidence that the ERO chief was forced to retire and the HSI leader was demoted on or before the 28th.
It’s not clear if the firing/demotions were announced in front of everyone in the room as well as whether Miller was stressed out over his wife Katie suddenly talking about how she heard ketamine is a really relaxing high and left her laptop browser open to a page listing Afrikaans sex slang. Either way he was definitely stressed. “Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said an official relaying secondhand recall of the scene.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?'” the official continued, recounting the bald Nazi cuck’s frenzied accusations of sloth.
This prompted one of the ERO field directors to stand up and say that the public messaging from the White House was that they were only supposed to be detaining criminals, not otherwise law-abiding undocumented people. The “family-oriented” ones whose citizen neighbors voted for cheaper eggs.
“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the source who got this secondhand but probably speaking to a real tension between the political optics for the agency and Miller not giving a shit about that.
.@StephenM: https://t.co/IjFdietRgU pic.twitter.com/ndcIsPHWFd
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) May 30, 2025
And, for obvious reasons, just being in a bad mood in general these days.
“Later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem came in and addressed the dozens of top ICE officials. ‘You guys are doing an OK job, but you’re not doing enough. You need to do more,'” the Examiner writes about the dog murderer’s contributions to the heated discussion, lol.
“Stephen Miller did not say many of the things you state,” was ICE’s statement in response to a request for comment, obligatorily carried by the Examiner, whose article then goes into detail about the internal politics surrounding the removals of the HSI and ERO divisions of the agency. “Trump has promised to carry out the ‘largest-ever’ deportation operation but is on track to come in below the highest year during the Obama administration,” they write. Might as well have added a 🌮 emoji.
Overall the level of morale and professionalism at the agency is described as less than ideal by sources. “We all know that they are not meeting expectations. Some of it is atrophy. Some of it is lack of funding/jail space,” an official wrote in a text to the Examiner, adding they “need to be better.”
The official then said that ERO officials on temporary assignment to major metropolitan areas to assist with operations spent more time doing tourist shit than they did on their jobs. “These guys, it’s hard for them to step up and meet this moment because they’re just not that good.”
This is already pretty goddamned long so going to have to save the analysis on the gulf between the expectations the Trump Regime set for the MAGA base and ICE’s ability to execute it.
The gulf seems about as wide as the Gulf of Mexico.
And it would seem as though the frustrations have translated into action. Really, fucked up, indefensible, hasty action like arresting an 18 year-old high school kid on his way to volleyball practice. Marcelo Gomes, an undocumented Brazilian who has lived in Massachusetts since he was five, was nabbed over the weekend because ICE was looking for his father, a student visa overstayer who the car is registered to, according to the Daily Beast. “I didn’t say he was dangerous, I said he was in this country illegally, and we’re not going to walk away from anybody,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told reporters at a press conference on Monday amid a massive outrage over the arrest.