Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other high-level posts have been outsiders, often with Fox News appearances as key qualifications. But to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency expected to execute what is touted as one of his administration’s signature policies, the mass deportation of millions of immigrants, Trump went a different route, tapping Caleb Vitello, who has decades of experience with the agency.
That experience will most likely help Vitello implement Trump’s deportation policies quickly. So, too, will Trump’s decision to name him as “acting” director, meaning he won’t have to wait for Senate confirmation to start aggressive removal efforts.
Vitello “grew up in the Enforcement and Removal Operations division” of ICE, a current ICE official said. With more than 20 years of experience at ICE, he’s intimately familiar with how it hunts fugitives, the official added.
That expertise will be needed, because more than 400,000 immigrants with criminal convictions are on the agency’s non-detained docket, meaning they came into the U.S. and have pending immigration proceedings but aren’t in detention, according to ICE.
Jason Houser, who was chief of staff at ICE during the Biden administration until early 2023, called Vitello a thoughtful, good leader. “He knows the complexities and challenges of a broken immigration system,” Houser said.
Multiple agency insiders expressed relief that an ICE veteran was chosen.
“He’s very even-keeled. I honestly I can’t think of a single thing that [is] controversial about him. I don’t want to call him a Boy Scout, but he’s as close as it gets,” said Corey Price, the former acting executive associate director of Enforcement and Removal Operations.
ICE’s 20,000 agents in 400 offices will be in charge of the entire removal process, including searching for immigrants in the country illegally, detaining them in ICE facilities, taking them to staging areas in the Southern U.S. and overseeing ICE-chartered flights out of the country.
Vitello oversaw the recent implementation of a body-worn camera policy that requires agents to activate the cameras during searches and seizures and when they are on active patrol or are apprehending fugitives.
Expert on use of force
Vitello was the primary use-of-force instructor at the agency’s training facility at Fort Benning, Georgia, for five years and testified on behalf of ICE in a use-of-force case in 2018, according to court documents.
The case involved a 2013 incident in which an ICE agent was moving a shackled and handcuffed detainee from one cell to another. The detainee accused the agent of pushing him from behind so that he fell flat on his face on a concrete floor. Because the detainee was fully restrained, he was unable to shield his face and lost several teeth.
The ICE agent was criminally charged, but a judge later dismissed the case. The detainee filed a civil suit against ICE claiming the agent’s behavior was a direct result of agency training.
Vitello disputed ICE’s claim on the stand in 2018, saying that what the ICE agent had done was “highly unusual” and “outrageous” and “is nothing that we teach, it is nothing that we do, it is nothing that we would agree upon,” according to court filings.
