The Department of Homeland Security flatly denied weekend reports that ICE had been told to spare non-criminal illegal immigrants, declaring no one is off the table and deportations will continue.
Newsweek reported that DHS pushed back hard after The Daily Wire, citing agency sources, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been instructed to arrest only illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or charges and to end so-called collateral arrests.
On Saturday, the official DHS account on X shared the Daily Wire piece and rejected it in plain terms. The agency said it would keep arresting any illegal aliens who come into its path and would deport anyone in the country illegally.
That denial lands at the center of President Trump’s second-term crackdown on illegal immigration, a core promise that has already driven border crossings to their lowest level since 1970. Any signal that field agents were being told to stand down on non-criminal cases was always going to draw a swift response.
In the same Saturday post, DHS described a nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities. Officers, the agency said, are going after criminal illegal aliens, including murderers, rapists, child predators, and gang members, many of them released from jails by sanctuary politicians.
“This is false. No one is off the table. We will continue to arrest any and all illegal aliens that come into our path.”
DHS added that anyone in the country illegally will be arrested and deported, framing the surge as an effort to protect American citizens.
Fox News congressional correspondent Bill Melugin offered a more detailed picture from inside the agencies. He said he had spoken with nine ICE and DHS insiders who described “verbal guidance” sent to ICE offices telling agents to avoid non-criminal migrants. Those same sources called the guidance “erroneous” and the result of a “miscommunication” about prioritizing the “worst first.”
Melugin reported there had been no change in immigration enforcement policy. Guidance went out to ICE field offices Saturday night to reaffirm that point. He also said President Trump insisted anyone in the United States illegally remains “on the table” for ICE agents.
Not every voice inside ICE accepted the official line at face value. An anonymous ICE officer told The Daily Wire the agency seemed to be trying to calm things down before the midterm elections. Another officer said, “I hope Trump finds out about this s*** and puts an end to it.”
Those comments reflect the tension that builds when enforcement priorities appear to shift without a clear written order. Verbal guidance can travel fast through field offices and create exactly the kind of confusion Melugin later described as a miscommunication.
The episode also fits a recent pattern. In July, after fatal shootings in Texas and Maine, DHS told ICE agents to stop conducting traffic stops. That restriction was later overturned following criticism from Trump. Agents have spent the past year dealing with multiple shootings, some deadly, involving suspected illegal migrants and anti-ICE protesters.
In Minneapolis this January, ICE officers shot and killed two anti-ICE activists, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, during altercations. Earlier this month, an ICE agent shot and wounded 28-year-old DoorDash driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez; the agent was not wearing a bodycam. Those incidents feed the political fight over how aggressively ICE should operate in the interior.
Public opinion has moved as well. An Economist/YouGov tracker showed Trump’s handling of immigration falling from a plus-11 net rating in February 2025 to a minus-13 by the end of August, with 40 percent of American adults approving and 53 percent disapproving. Border numbers have improved sharply since January 2025, but interior enforcement remains the harder political test.
Sanctuary city policies that release criminal illegal aliens back onto the street give DHS a ready target for its public safety surge. The agency’s Saturday statement put the blame for those releases squarely on sanctuary politicians and listed the categories of offenders ICE intends to pursue.
What the record shows so far is a denied report, an official insistence that policy never changed, and a Saturday-night reaffirmation to the field. The Daily Wire’s agency sources described limits on non-criminal and collateral arrests. DHS called that account false. Melugin’s nine insiders split the difference: verbal guidance went out, it was wrong, and it was walked back the same weekend.
Newsweek reached out to DHS by email on Sunday, outside regular office hours, for further comment on the sequence. Absolute calendar dates for the Daily Wire story, the DHS post, and the Saturday-night cable remain tied to the weekend references in the reporting. No full text of any underlying written guidance has been released in the coverage.
For officers in the field, the practical question is simple: do they still have authority to arrest every illegal immigrant they encounter, or only those already charged or convicted? DHS says the first answer is the correct one. Trump, through Melugin, says the same. The anonymous officers who spoke to The Daily Wire were less sure the message had stayed consistent on the way down the chain.
American communities living with the results of catch-and-release and sanctuary releases do not need mixed signals from Washington. Enforcement that prioritizes the worst offenders first is common sense. Pretending non-criminal illegal presence is somehow off-limits is not.
