What it would take for America to deport 11mn immigrants

Amid the blizzard of activity in the first few days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, one issue has stood out: the plans to implement his campaign promise of the largest deportation operation in US history.

In a flurry of announcements, Trump has already declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border, which allows for a greater military presence on border areas, and implemented an indefinite pause to America’s refugee resettlement programme, choking off access to asylum.

“We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” Trump declared in his inauguration speech. “We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

The border, he said later, was his “number-one issue”.  

Given that there are approximately 11mn people in the US without permanent legal status, a genuine mass deportation would have a wrenching impact on American society, its economy and its sense of self as a nation. 

Deportation on a Trumpian scale would also face enormous financial, legal and logistical hurdles at every step of the process: identification, apprehension, detention and expulsion. The federal government currently lacks the systems, the facilities and, in some cases, the legal authority to carry out the operations that Trump has described.

According to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration non-profit group, it would take more than 10 years and cost almost $1tn.

“It’s not like you just flip a switch and just immediately start rounding people up and sending them to the border”, says John Torres, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director during the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations. ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, are tasked with removing unauthorised migrants from the US — ICE from the country’s interior, and CBP at the border.

The deportation infrastructure is already stretched perilously thin. In the fiscal year 2024, under Joe Biden’s administration, ICE, which takes care of removals with court orders, deported 271,484 unauthorised immigrants, a 10-year high. The peak under Trump’s first term was 267,000 in fiscal year 2019.

“The idea of 1mn to 2mn [deportations] a year is . . . aspirational. It’s probably unrealistic, given the resources that are available to do it”, says Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a predecessor agency to ICE, who is now at the Migration Policy Institute think-tank. “The numbers are not likely to be dramatically greater [than they are now], at least for a while.”

The Trump administration has demonstrated a willingness to take drastic steps to realise some version of its goal, for example threatening to use an arcane wartime law that allows the federal government to detain and deport citizens of enemy nations, and opening the way for private prison companies to add capacity for tens of thousands of detainees at speed.

Despite these extreme measures, however, some experts and former immigration officials told the Financial Times that Trump’s ambition simply could not be accomplished.

“In my opinion, it’s going to be impossible for them to achieve the goal that they set out — which is really getting rid of all the illegal immigrants in the United States,” says David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute think-tank.

The first obstacle for the Trump team is to detain many of the people they say they want to deport.

Trump and his immigration tsar, Tom Homan, say they are prioritising the deportation of undocumented migrants with criminal histories. Going after people who have been convicted of crimes is likely to be a more politically palatable way of ramping up deportations.

ICE says that, as of July last year, there were 662,566 non-citizens with criminal convictions or pending charges, approximately 15,000 of whom have already been detained by the agency. About 148,000 have been convicted or charged with assault, murder, kidnapping or sexual assault.

They’re trying to manipulate public reaction by saying they’re only doing particular targets. The reality is going to be very different

But one problem is that the definition of “criminal” on this list is a broad one — more than 128,000 people are on it for traffic offences.

“What ICE is very good at is working off lists,” says John Sandweg, acting director of ICE during the Obama administration. Agents know who they are looking for and might have location information, he says.

Yet Sandweg says that it takes time to find and apprehend someone who is at large after committing serious crimes, something that consumes “traditional police work” like “building informant relationships in the immigrant communities”. As a result, it can often be easier for immigration officials to deport people accused of petty crimes.

The focus on expelling undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions or charges is not new. But the Trump administration says that it is bolstering the federal response to harness the defence, state and justice departments. The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it would deploy about 1,500 active-duty troops, plus helicopters, to the US-Mexico border, a 60 per cent increase in ground forces there.

Homan has also said there will be more so-called collateral arrests, in which immigrants who are not targeted for arrest are swept up during enforcement actions.

Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School, says that “huge numbers of people who don’t fit that profile [of criminals] are going to get swept in” to any mass deportation drive. He adds: “That’s going to be camouflaged, because they’re trying to manipulate public reaction by saying they’re only doing particular targets. The reality is going to be very different.”

Any push to expand arrests will also require co-operation from local law enforcement agencies.

Under the constitution, the federal government does not have authority over state enforcement bodies. Instead, it has set up so-called 287(g) agreements — voluntary programmes that allow ICE to delegate immigration enforcement to state and local agencies. 

In one of the executive orders signed last Monday, Trump directed the government to pursue such agreements “to the maximum extent permitted by law”.

The administration seems to be building towards a political fight with so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions, which refuse to co-operate with federal immigration enforcement efforts.

During his first term, Trump sought to deny federal funding to localities adopting “sanctuary” policies, efforts that were blocked by US courts. The president has resurfaced this strategy, asking the attorney-general and the secretary of homeland security to “ensure” that such jurisdictions, “which seek to interfere with the lawful exercise of federal law enforcement operations, do not receive access to federal funds”.

The Department of Justice has directed staff to investigate state and local officials who fail to comply with “immigration-related commands” for potential prosecutions, in what many observers view as a thinly veiled threat.

On Capitol Hill last week, both houses of Congress passed the Laken Riley Act with bipartisan votes. Named after a nursing student who was killed last year by an unauthorised immigrant, the bill broadens the number of offences that require mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants until they are deported to include theft, burglary, larceny or shoplifting. Trump is expected to sign the bill into law swiftly, which would make it the first legislative win of his second presidency.

Trump has also focused on broadening the power of arrest. He has rescinded guidance set by former president Joe Biden that barred ICE agents from making arrests at or near “sensitive locations” such as places of worship and schools — a move that legal experts warn might dent students’ attendance for fear of immigration enforcement actions. 

“The Trump administration has already been successful in instilling fear in immigrant communities and making it more difficult . . . to do simple things like take their children to school, access medical care, pray in houses of worship,” says Elora Mukherjee, professor at Columbia Law School.

This raises the question about the political reaction to a large increase in arrests. During Trump’s first term, he faced a public relations catastrophe over the separation of migrant children from their parents. The risk for the White House is that distressing images of mass arrests make the rounds in the news and on social media, including people who are pillars of their communities, prompting a bipartisan backlash.

Sandweg says that when in the ICE director chair, “you get calls from Republican members of Congress [asking], ‘Why are you deporting this guy? . . . I’m getting these calls from the pastor and from the congregants.’”

Even if the administration is successful in detaining many more undocumented migrants, it would face the problem of having to house them. Tens of thousands of people will need to be held for months while they await trial in immigration courts.

ICE has capacity — measured in number of beds — to detain 41,500 people at any given time. Homan has indicated he will need “at least 100,000 beds” to carry out the administration’s aims.

“It’s an extraordinarily important piece of this puzzle, and dealing with capacity issues in detention will be a challenge,” says Bier at the Cato Institute.

The American Immigration Council reckons that, if the administration is to deport all the 11mn undocumented people living in the country, ICE will need to build 216 new facilities every year for more than a decade, each with a capacity of 500 people.

Housing detainees will fall largely to private prisons, which accounted for as much as 90 per cent of detentions in 2023, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The market values of the country’s two biggest private prison companies have surged since the election: GEO Group’s stock has doubled, while CoreCivic’s has risen more than 50 per cent.

The for-profit prison industry was a strong backer of Trump’s campaign, after he vowed to scrap a 2021 Biden order that began phasing out DoJ contracts with for-profit prisons — which he also did on his first day in office.

CoreCivic, which supplies about 10,000 beds, says it could almost quadruple this capacity in about 180 days.

“We could go tomorrow and incrementally staff up,” says chief executive Damon Hininger. “We’re having those conversations with ICE on how we could be helpful if they do raise the level of capacity.”

But expanding capacity comes at a high cost. The AIC estimates the government, if it were to deport all undocumented people, would need to spend $66bn a year just on building and operating detention facilities.

New holding facilities would cost about $36mn a piece to build and another $48mn a year to staff and operate. “The long-term costs of a mass deportation operation, while difficult to gauge, would undeniably be enormous,” the AIC concluded in a recent report.

Republicans have promised to allocate up to $100bn for border security and enforcement for an unspecified timeframe. But even if they can get that through Congress, in the near term the authorities will struggle to muster the necessary resources — even if other law enforcement agencies are roped in.

“There is no way . . . they have the staff, the money and the resources and the legal authority to turn and start doing immigration enforcement [and] immigration detention,” says Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff.

The final logistical challenge for the administration is deporting the people who have been detained. 

Individuals with outstanding deportation orders may be removed immediately. “But that is a relatively small number,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, retired immigration law professor at Cornell Law School. “Most people picked up will be put into deportation proceedings in immigration courts.” 

That places the rest of the burden on underfunded and overburdened immigration courts, which could be a significant stumbling block to Trump’s plans. The courts’ backlog has swelled from 656,000 pending cases in the fiscal year 2017 to 3.6mn at the end of fiscal year 2024, according to MPI.

Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want — more agents in the communities, more people arrested, more collaterals arrested

Trump is seeking to sidestep immigration courts altogether. The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday issued a new rule that expanded the reach of “expedited removal”, under which undocumented immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the country for more than two years are deported with no court review. Trump pursued a similar measure during his first presidency.

The practice previously applied to individuals apprehended within around 115 miles of the country’s international land borders. Now, it may be used across the US.

“The effect of this change will be to enhance national security and public safety — while reducing government costs — by facilitating prompt immigration determinations,” said the DHS.

The Trump administration could also face opposition from some of the countries to which it wants to deport migrants. Colombia announced on Sunday that it had declined entry to US military flights carrying migrants, saying the individuals needed to be flown on civilian planes and treated with “dignity and respect”. Trump immediately responded by placing 25 per cent tariffs on imports from Colombia. 

Trump’s flurry of immigration policies are set to face a wave of legal challenges, with some Democratic states and civil rights groups already suing his administration.

The ACLU and other groups on Wednesday sued to block the DHS rule broadening “expedited removal”.

“The Trump administration wants to use this illegal policy to fuel its mass deportation agenda and rip communities apart,” Anand Balakrishnan, an ACLU lawyer leading the case, said in a statement. “Expanding expedited removal would give Trump a cheat code to circumvent due process and the constitution.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Democratic state attorneys-general and civil rights groups have also filed several lawsuits to invalidate Trump’s new executive order that bans birthright citizenship, alleging that it violates the constitution’s 14th amendment, which says that all “persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States”. This ban has already been temporarily halted by a US federal judge. The White House said it would appeal.

Homan on Sunday said that his idea of success does not necessarily include deporting every unauthorised immigrant in the US, in what seemed like an attempt at managing expectations. “I’m being realistic,” he told ABC. “We can do what we can with the money we have”.

But Homan has also insisted the administration will accelerate arrests and detentions, even if there is political opposition. And he is willing to put heavy pressure on local politicians who try to stymie those efforts.

“Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want — more agents in the communities, more people arrested, more collaterals arrested,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “So that’s a game they want to play? Game on.”

Additional reporting by Alex Rogers in Washington

Cartography by Cleve Jones