Overseeing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and government-wide anti-immigration efforts is a constellation of longtime loyalists, law enforcement officials and advisers spread across federal agencies.
The president has reshaped the government around his mission to find, arrest and deport tens of thousands of people, deter new arrivals and impose severe restrictions on legal immigration that have stranded refugees and forced immigrants to flee the country.
That mission is dovetailing with his campaign of “retribution” against political opponents, whose cities have been occupied by federal officers and National Guard troops under his direction.
These are some of the agencies and players in charge.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of policy
The architect of the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies in his first term returned to the White House last year as an influential force behind mass deportations and the president’s attempts to unilaterally define who gets to be a citizen.
White House adviser Stephen Miller is an influential voice informing the president’s anti-immigration agenda (Getty Images)
Months into Trump’s second term, the 40-year-old far-right adviser allegedly instructed officials to carry out mass arrests and make at least 3,000 a day to keep pace with Trump’s ambitions for 1 million people removed from the country each year.
He has long advocated for ending birthright citizenship, a challenge that is now up for the Supreme Court to decide, and he floated the idea that the Trump administration could suspend the fundamental right of habeas corpus to accelerate deportations without a hearing.
But after months of combative statements in defense of sweeping immigration operations that have outraged millions of Americans, Miller suggested for the first time that federal officers in Minnesota who fatally shot Alex Pretti “may not have been following” protocol.
Miller previously accused Democratic officials of supporting “insurrection” and baselessly accused Pretti of being a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.”
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary
The former South Dakota governor directs the nation’s third-largest Cabinet-level department, with 22 agencies under her direction — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, the two main immigration enforcement arms carrying out street-level operations.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem leads a massive Cabinet-level department that includes ICE and border patrol (Getty Images)
Homeland Security’s annual budget of more than $103 billion includes billions of dollars for recruiting new ICE agents and expanding a detention center footprint that already is jailing more than 60,000 immigrants at any given time.
Former Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski is a special government employee who works closely with Noem, while her deputy secretary Tricia McLaughlin serves as a prominent Homeland Security spokesperson.
Democratic members of Congress and some Republicans are now demanding Noem’s resignation, with Democrats warning that impeachment investigations are imminent unless she steps down after federal officers fatally shot two people on the streets of Minneapolis.
Facing an intense and increasingly bipartisan backlash over her response to the chaos in Minnesota, Trump removed Noem’s top official from the state and replaced him with a White House adviser who reports directly to him, effectively cutting Noem out of the chain of command.
Tom Homan, White House border czar
Homan, who was deployed to Minnesota in an apparent rebuke of Noem’s performance, played a key role in immigration enforcement in a period where then-President Obama received the nickname “deporter in chief” from immigrant communities. Homan received a Presidential Rank Award in 2015.
White House border czar Tom Homan previously served under the Obama administration when the former president was derided as ‘deporter in chief’ (REUTERS)
The United States carried out 432,000 deportations in 2013 during Obama’s second term, the highest annual total since records were kept.
Homan, whose work in that time is widely seen as the foundation for family separation policies that plagued Trump’s first term, signaled a return to family detentions and breaking up families with U.S. citizen children before Trump entered office.
He tapped David Venturella, a former executive for private prison contractor GEO Group, to support the administration’s deportation agenda. He is now serving in a top role at ICE managing contracts for immigrant detention centers. GEO Group runs at least 20 ICE facilities and is the agency’s largest provider.
Gregory Bovino, commander-at-large, Customs and Border Protection
After leading surges of federal officers into Democratic-cities through 2025, leaving behind a trail of lawsuits over allegations that his agents brutalized immigrants and citizens alike, Noem’s boots-on-the-ground commander is now headed back to his California homebase.
Bovino, CPB’s “commander-at-large,” is a longtime border patrol officer whose career catapulted into the public eye with the Trump administration’s street-level surges. He has also become known for his clothing, which some say resembles a look of Nazi officials during World War II.
Gregory Bovino, the boots-on-the-ground commander for Trump’s immigration enforcement surges, appears to have been sidelined after fatal shootings in Minnesota (REUTERS)
Rather than report to CPB’s typical chain of command, Bovino reported directly to Noem.
Last summer, Bovino began joining his masked and heavily armed officers on the street as they supported ICE in several cities to effectively block off protesters and bystanders from ICE operations, resulting in violent clashes and arrests that Bovino relished on social media.
Last year, he was ordered to testify in federal court over his officers’ use of force in Chicago, which a judge said “shocks the conscience.”
And the president, who has unwaveringly backed operations in cities run by his political opponents, seemed to believe that Bovino had gone too far after the officers in his command fired 10 shots at Alex Pretti as his body lay motionless on the frozen streets of Minneapolis.
“You know, Bovino is very good. But he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “And in some cases, that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”
Todd Lyons, acting director, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Lyons oversees an agency with more than 27,400 people, an annual budget of nearly $10 billion and more than $74 billion in funding from Trump’s massive domestic spending bill signed into law last year.
Before he tapped to lead ICE, which is often the shorthand for federal immigration officers and immigration enforcement generally, Lyons was a top official at the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau.
ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons oversees a vast network of detention centers that hold more than 60,000 immigrants at any given time (AP)
He has also shaped logistics for moving thousands of detainees through a sprawling detention center system — and has bluntly compared the movement of people to packages.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business, where this mass deportation operation is something like you would see and say, like, Amazon trying to get your Prime delivery within 24 hours,” Lyons told a law enforcement conference in Phoenix in 2025.
Joseph Edlow, director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Immigrants attending ICE check-ins or other immigration appointments have faced arrest when they show up, including at offices for the agency responsible for issuing visas and green cards
Under Edlow’s direction, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has radically overhauled how the agency approaches immigration, moving the agency from a largely administrative role into a key law enforcement tool.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow has transformed the administrative agency into a key immigration enforcement tool (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The agency is also creating its own law enforcement arm to investigate and arrest immigrants and their lawyers. That new class of agents is tasked with “making arrests, carrying firearms, executing search and arrest warrants, and other powers standard for federal law enforcement,” according to the agency.
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Rubio has collected several job titles since joining the Trump administration. But as Secretary of State, the former senator has been central to the president’s anti-immigration agenda, from fielding El Salvador’s offer to imprison immigrants and publicly defying judge’s orders to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported man, to revoking visas for hundreds of international students and threatening to deport activists who demonstrated against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has overhauled the nation’s refugee policies and stripped hundreds of visas for international students as part of a campaign against campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza (AFP via Getty Images)
Internal government documents revealed in court documents show that Rubio personally approved the arrest and removal of five international student activists for their Palestinian advocacy.
A federal judge determined that Rubio and Noem engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” and “failed in their duties to protect the Constitution” by violating the First Amendment rights of students and faculty with threats to strip them of visas and arrest and deport them.
Rubio has also overhauled the nation’s refugee system and reshaped the State Department to fulfill Trump’s America First approach, including plans for an Office of Remigration to serve as a “hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking” and support “the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin or legal status.”