“…Donald Trump has said over the years that he welcomes and even encourages rivalries in his administration, and delights in watching aides compete to please him.
But for the past year, the president has allowed a rift to widen within the team tasked with delivering on the mass-deportation plan that is his most important domestic-policy initiative. That has led to months of acrimony and left many veteran officials at DHS—including those who support the president’s deportation goals—astonished at the dysfunction.
The president’s crackdown has adopted an improvisational approach, not an institutional one, with blurred leadership roles and no clear chain of command. White House Deputy Chief of Staff
Stephen Miller has been holding daily conference calls pressuring DHS and other federal agencies to prioritize immigration arrests and deportations above all other objectives. Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, who has been working at DHS as a “special government employee,” have aggressively tried to meet Miller’s demands and use the department’s advertising budgets and social-media accounts to promote anti-immigrant messaging.
They have worked around Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has had little role in operations, instead dispatching a second-tier Border Patrol official named
Gregory Bovino to sweep through cities led by Democrats. Bovino told his superiors that he reported directly to Noem, not to Scott—who wanted his agents to go back to protecting U.S. borders, and has struggled to maintain control of his own agency.
… Frustrated by the bipartisan backlash to Alex Pretti’s death, Trump announced on Monday that Homan would take over the operation in Minnesota. Bovino has been
stripped of his “commander” role and sent back to his old job on the border in El Centro, California. Seemingly well aware of the divides around him, Trump announced that he was removing Noem from the chain of command in Minnesota. “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me,” Trump said….”