Two of President Donald Trump’s top immigration officials clashed so violently over a brutal new deportation “master plan” that Department of Homeland Security staffers were forced to “clear the room,” a bombshell new book reveals.
The blow-up between then-acting ICE director Caleb Vitello—a 23-year agency veteran—and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Rodney Scott is said to have erupted at a February 2025 meeting in which Scott was peddling a scheme to combine ICE, CBP, and Pentagon firepower into a single mass-deportation steamroller.
The moment is detailed by NBC News’ senior homeland security correspondent, Julia Ainsley, in her new book, Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump’s Mass Deportation Program.
The blueprint—dubbed the “master plan” by its architects and given the thumbs-up by then-Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, 54—would have created a National Incident Command Center.
It would have delivered Trump’s promised “shock and awe” target of one million deportations in year one, by sending federal agents to storm the last-known addresses of 700,000 immigrants with previous removal orders, with no judges required.
But Vitello dug his heels in, Ainsley writes. The veteran cop warned Scott and his aides that the addresses had not been freshly verified—and that innocent U.S. citizens could end up wrongly scooped up by federal agents busting through doors without judicial warrants, two DHS officials told Ainsley.
The book details that tempers boiled over. Scott, visibly furious, is said to have “slammed his hands on a table” as Vitello refused to budge. The flare-up forced their handlers to intervene, physically clearing the room and ending the meeting.
Days later, the book reveals, Vitello was quietly shunted aside—reassigned to oversee training for incoming ICE officers—and replaced by Todd Lyons, 52, then the agency’s acting head of Enforcement and Removal Operations. Last month, Lyons announced he was leaving his role as ICE director on May 31.
Although Scott’s command center never fully took off, his master plan won the war, Ainsley states. In mid-May, Lyons quietly signed a memo allowing officers to bust into people’s homes using nothing more than administrative warrants rubber-stamped by ICE field offices—bypassing judges entirely.
The following month, Border Patrol agents and ICE officers had been unleashed on Los Angeles in an aggressive enforcement surge that sparked huge protests before fanning out into other Democrat-run cities.
The fallout escalated catastrophically after the fatal shootings of two American citizens—unarmed mom Renee Nicole Good and VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti—by federal agents during immigration operations in Minneapolis. Trump’s polling on immigration nosedived, and even the president conceded the operations had gone too far.
Noem was fired in early March. Her replacement, former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, 48, has since paused agents entering homes without judicial warrants and shelved DHS plans to buy warehouses for mass detention.
At a House hearing last month, Lyons told lawmakers 570,000 people had been deported since Trump returned to the White House—well short of the million-a-year target that triggered Vitello’s removal in the first place.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.
