DHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’

CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThe Department of Homeland Security’s top numbers-cruncher has resigned, citing the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants” on his way out.DHS has been a hub of controversy during the second Trump term: the ICE raids in American cities, the wild spending, the growing archipelago of detention centers, the attempts to hide data about it all. But vanishingly few officials have left the department and been openly critical of the direction it has taken.

Marc Rosenblum, who served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics and a deputy assistant secretary at the department, is one of the first.“I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

Rosenblum also served in the first Trump and Biden administrations, initially running DHS’s office of immigration statistics, and then overseeing stats for the entire department—collating numbers on everything from cybersecurity intrusions to trafficking investigations to deportations. His office peaked at 45 people in the Biden years, and started to shrink since.“He had one of the most interesting charges at DHS,” a former colleague tells WIRED of Rosenblum.

“There's 22 component agencies, and so there are 22 different ways of aggregating data that were just completely siloed.”“So Marc's charge was to consolidate all the data and put it in a way that internally, I at headquarters could know exactly how many Coast Guard interdictions happened off the Coast Guard station in Miami, and how many of those were Cuban, Haitian, Nicaragua, Venezuelan. And then kind of conceptualize that with the same population of people that were crossing the Southwest border,” the former colleague adds.

A domestic security agency like DHS is never going to be a model of transparency. But Rosenblum, a long-time immigration policy wonk and an immigration specialist for the Congressional Research Service, promised as much openness as possible when he took on his department-wide role in 2023. “We’ll begin releasing data more quickly, with greater granularity and covering a broader scope of DHS activities,” he told Federal News Network that November.

That data itself became controversial in Trump 2.0. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics’ website on ICE detentions, Border Patrol encounters, and DHS repatriations hasn’t been updated since February 11, 2025, just weeks into the second Trump term.

What information has been pried from DHS since then, often through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, has been at times spotty and unreliable, analysts say.“There’s no accountability, no way to assess, no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency,” David Bier, the Cato Institute’s director of immigration studies, told NOTUS in November.DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.

Neither did Rosenblum. But he did allude to the difficulty of publishing quality data under this administration in his LinkedIn post. “My OHSS co-workers are outstanding career federal civil servants.

They are smart, mission-focused experts who produce high quality results in a challenging and often hostile work environment,” he wrote.“Marc was exactly what every American should want in a career public servant,” Luis Miranda, a top DHS spokesman during the Biden years, tells WIRED. “The Trump administration has governed by silencing or ignoring facts and information they believe doesn’t line up with their extreme rhetoric, and that has damaging implications, so it's no surprise career officials whose job is transparency are unable to do those jobs.”

Rosenblum is one of a number of DHS officials who have left since Trump’s second inauguration, including acting ICE director Todd Lyons and multiple acting chiefs of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But most of those people haven’t been publicly critical of the administration. Same goes for Kristi Noem—Trump’s first DHS chief, who left under a cloud of scandal—and her controversial top aide, Corey Lewandowski.

ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank was the rare exception to speak out, testifying before Congress about the “broken” training program for new recruits.Schwank is now joined by Rosenblum, who, before he joined the first Trump administration, warned that a policy of mass deportation could prove to be risky, expensive, and cruel. The more people you try to remove, he warned a Senate committee in 2015, the more counterproductive the attempts are likely to be.

“The deportation dilemma is that more humane enforcement is fundamentally in tension with stricter immigration control,” he said in written testimony. “A robust enforcement system inevitably inflicts damage on esta