DHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’

Noah ShachtmanSecurityJul 27, 2026 4:34 PMDHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’The outgoing executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics is one of very few federal officials to speak out against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave 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.Asked about Rosenblum’s resignation and his “war on immigrants” comment on LinkedIn, a DHS spokesperson says in a statement, “People are always welcome to their opinion—that doesn't make it right or factual. We will not comment on personal decisions.”Rosenblum did not respond to a request for comment, 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 wor