ICE chief tangles with White House over political appointees
The personnel clash is the latest example of the acting director, career official Matthew Albence, falling afoul of Trump campaign veterans.
ICE acting Director Matthew Albence has sought to balance humanitarian concerns during the coronavirus outbreak with pressure to take more aggressive measures against those in the country illegally. | Scott Heins/Getty Images
By BETSY WOODRUFF SWAN and DANIEL LIPPMAN
The acting chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is resisting a White House effort to install a number of political appointees at the agency he helms, according to three current and former U.S. officials who described the situation to POLITICO.
The battle comes as the powerful head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, John McEntee, pushes hard to place Trump allies in key positions throughout the government. McEntee, a 29-year-old former campaign staffer who has the president's ear, is turning his focus to immigration as the 2020 election approaches. But the effort has faced resistance from Matthew Albence, a career law enforcement officer and ICE's acting director.
According to the officials, the White House has spent about two months vetting a short list of candidates for open positions at ICE. The personnel office assembled the list — which included potential candidates for chief of staff and Office of Policy director — and then, in consultation with the top two Department of Homeland Security officials, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, brought the names of the candidates to ICE.
But Albence resisted the White House push. The effort has now slowed, according to one senior administration official, and it's unclear if or when the people on the list will get jobs at ICE.
"Albence was not happy with PPO," another senior administration official said, adding that "he's really been pushing back a lot" against the newly invigorated office's efforts. Albence even called Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller on the matter, according to that official.
The clash is the latest in an intensifying series of battles between Albence and other top officials, who have tangled in recent months as the ICE chief has sought to balance humanitarian concerns about the treatment of immigrants during the coronavirus outbreak with pressure from Trump administration officials who see the crisis as an opportunity to take more aggressive measures against those in the country illegally.
The director's defenders say he opposed efforts to install the White House's picks because they didn't have enough law enforcement experience and weren't qualified for the roles available. Some did have connections to the 2016 Trump campaign for which McEntee was Donald Trump's body man and has been drawing people to fill jobs in the administration.
John McEntee, head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A White House official, meanwhile, said the office "only considers well-qualified candidates who would implement the president's agenda diligently and effectively."
POLITICO has reported on a number of instances, however, where the personnel office installed officials who had yet to even graduate from college — leading to complaints from within Cabinet agencies that the White House was hiring neophytes for sensitive posts. Defenders of those efforts, meanwhile, have long argued that career officials throughout the executive branch have stymied Trump's priorities, and that the president is entitled to fill jobs with the people who win his confidence.
When asked for comment, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement: "ICE has an incredibly complex and difficult mission, critical to the national security and public safety of this country. All individuals hired by the agency, whether into career or political positions, are hired based solely on their qualifications and ability to contribute to this mission."
Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of ICE under Trump, said that if political appointees at ICE aren't qualified, "it would be a negative because they're not adding any value to the mission. If they don't know what ICE's core capabilities are, then how are they advisory?"
On the other hand, political hires with the requisite experience could be a "useful tool" to keep tabs on what the White House wants or reach out to allies in other agencies or on Capitol Hill, said Vitiello, now an independent consultant on homeland security and border strategy issues.
Traditionally, political officials' involvement in law enforcement agencies is limited but not nonexistent. Most of ICE's top officials are from the career ranks — including in jobs that political appointees have sometimes filled in the past. And while immigrants' rights activists have lambasted ICE for its work under the Trump administration, supporters of stricter immigration law enforcement argue it should be deporting more people.
Albence's opposition to the White House's efforts has heightened frustration in some corners of the Trump administration regarding his leadership of the agency, which currently has four of its eight political positions filled.
"He wants to protect his bureaucratic buddies in ICE, and he doesn't want politicals telling him to do difficult things," said one senior administration official.
That view captures a growing hostility toward Albence, a career official who rose through the ranks of various arms of the U.S. immigration apparatus to briefly become acting director in April 2019, and again beginning in July of that year.
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Top Trump administration officials were not happy with him in March after the agency announced it would halt most enforcement efforts during the coronavirus pandemic. They didn't like the optics and potential political consequences of temporarily adopting an immigration posture that could be compared with the Obama administration's approach. And shortly thereafter, Cuccinelli fired off a tweet thread purporting to clarify the agency's statement and saying it would keep prioritizing deporting immigrants who threaten public safety or have committed crimes, "just as it always has."
For groups advocating stricter immigration enforcement, continuity is a bug, not a feature. According to the Pew Research Center, deportations during the Trump administration "remain far lower than during President Barack Obama's first term in office." ICE points to so-called sanctuary cities' resistance to cooperation with federal law enforcement and to its surge of officers to the southern border as contributing to the lower deportation numbers. But for a president who campaigned as the ultimate immigration hard-liner, these numbers are bad news.
"ICE under the Trump administration has not managed to boost immigration enforcement in any significant way whatsoever, and there are reasons for that," said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for lower levels of immigration. "Some of those reasons are beyond their control, and some are not. And so I think that the agency has been a little bit — under both Albence and [former acting director Tom] Homan — a little bit hesitant to step up enforcement in certain areas and to implement certain policies that would make them more productive."
And that, she said, hasn't endeared Albence to some in the Trump administration. Vaughan praised his efforts and said she thinks he's doing a good job overall. But she noted that others would like to see more.
"I'm not saying it's easy for them to do, but there are people in the administration who've gotten impatient," she said. "And fairly or not, Matt may have become a focus of that impatience — a fall guy. There are people who have come to believe that changing the leadership is going to change the outcome."
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The tension comes as the agency grapples with the coronavirus pandemic's unprecedented challenges.
Of the 1,285 detainees who have been tested for Covid-19 since the start of the outbreak, almost half have tested positive, according to ICE data. And more than 130 ICE employees have also tested positive. There are currently under 30,000 people in ICE custody, a record low since September 2015, per data from Syracuse University. And the agency has 7,000 fewer people in custody than it did in March of this year, according to its website. To try to prevent more outbreaks at detention facilities, ICE says it has released more than 900 people who were considered at higher risk for the disease.
But ICE has received criticism from some communities that host ICE detention centers because it has continued transporting immigrant detainees between facilities, which could spread the virus. ICE insists it has taken robust steps to protect detainees and employees, and that it follows guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Albence has spent his entire career in law enforcement, joining the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1994 as a special agent in San Antonio, according to his official bio. He later worked in immigration investigations in Chicago and had a stint as a deputy special agent at the Transportation Security Administration. Before becoming deputy ICE director in 2018, he was ICE's executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, which has more than 7,600 employees. ERO handles the arrest, detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Albence is the fourth consecutive director of ICE who has been in an acting role during the Trump administration. Since the start of Trump's term, as in many other federal departments, DHS has had a string of vacancies and unfilled permanent slots. Wolf, for example, is the second acting secretary in a row to serve as head of DHS.
Immigration was one of Trump's signature issues during the 2016 campaign, and he has often talked to his supporters about progress building the wall on the southern border. More recently, he temporarily suspended certain categories of immigration, citing the need to keep out potential competition for labor as the pandemic destroys millions of American jobs.
White House,
Matthew Albence,