President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team are zeroing in on how to carry out his promised, largest-ever illegal immigrant deportation plan, but major challenges stand in the way.
Logistical problems, from finding enough airplanes and staffing to searching for people and detaining those in custody, are a top concern for the outside advisers and planners already in government. Implications, including the agriculture industry’s pushback over a possible worker shortage and blowback from Democratic-run sanctuary zones, also threaten to derail the operation before it gets underway.
Regardless of the barriers, voters want Trump to act. Immigration was a top three issue in the 2024 presidential election, while crimes committed by illegal immigrant suspects, including the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, received constant attention from Trump and his supporters.
The top election issue, the economy, would also be affected by mass deportation if more jobs became available to Americans and wages were driven up because people working under the table were no longer employed. Of course, the contrary is also possible if America loses too many workers and the supply chain suffers.
To carry out a mass deportation force that the nation has never seen the likes of before, Trump will have to build strong allies in Congress.
The far-too-small U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency will be “empowered,” incoming White House deputy policy chief Stephen Miller has said, to work with other law enforcement at the federal, state, tribal, and local levels to arrest immigrants.
“It’s going to be at light speed,” Miller said in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday evening.
“The moment that President Trump puts his hand on that Bible and takes the oath of office, as he has said, the occupation ends. Liberation day begins,” Miller said. “He will immediately sign executive orders sealing the border shut, beginning the largest deportation operation in American history, finding the criminal gangs, rapists, drug dealers, and monsters that have murdered our citizens and sending them home.”
How to coordinate a roundup
Moving people or goods in any scenario is a logistical challenge, but this one will be one for the history books.
ICE is composed of roughly 20,000 employees, just 7,000 of whom are part of its Enforcement and Removal Operations branch. Those 7,000 ERO officers are responsible for determining who to arrest, making the arrest within the country, detaining the person through court proceedings in which a judge will determine if he or she is to be removed from the country, and the deportation of that person.
Eight million cases are before the immigration courts as of this fall, with 1.3 million of those cases already decided and the subject having already been ordered removed, yet under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, they have not been deported.
Mayorkas has vowed several times since 2021 that those who go through the justice system and are ordered deported would be swiftly removed. The DHS did not respond to a request for comment on why well over 1 million immigrants are not priorities for deportation despite Mayorkas’s statement.
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Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance plan to start the deportation force targeting up to 1 million convicted criminals, as well as people whom a judge has ordered to be deported.
“For those that have gotten, for those that went to court and were ordered removed and they didn’t file an appeal within the appeal period, which is 30 days, that [removal] order is executable. They can be picked up and they can be removed,” said a former DHS official who is advising the Trump transition team on its mass deportation plan and who spoke with the Washington Examiner last week.
For some who were not in court when a judge ordered them removed, they can fight it and would have access to other legal delays that can drag out several years, the same official explained.
“They’re going to want to keep everybody in custody, but they’re also going to have to figure out, with so many people and limited bed space, who are the best people to keep in custody that you can ultimately remove,” the official said.
Getting started with deportations
Trump’s deportation depends on logistics, as well as other countries’ willingness to take back their citizens. All the 195 countries worldwide had citizens illegally cross the southern border during the Biden-Harris administration, and nearly all would likely have citizens in the United States who are candidates for deportation, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told the Washington Examiner.
The U.S. could withhold foreign aid or impose sanctions on countries that will not take back their citizens, including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, where many have fled.
“Reversing this chaos will take serious logistical effort and commitment to enforce the law, secure the border, and deport those here illegally,” Lankford said. “The American people deserve leadership that prioritizes their safety and sovereignty, not policies that undermine both. I’m confident President Trump will enforce our laws.”
Additional challenges include obtaining the manpower to make the arrests of some hundreds of thousands of people when a normal arrest can take weeks of planning and several hours to carry out.
A second former high-ranking immigration official said Trump could get started on day one and slowly but seriously amp up operations. The official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said ICE could double fugitive teams and put half of the officers on a specific task force team focused on the Trump agenda.
“There are people out right now looking for the worst of the worst in Boston and Los Angeles and Atlanta and Chicago and all the big cities you could name. There are people out in fugitive ops doing that exact thing,” the second official said. “Now, you have to scale that to meet the demand of the president. He wants to go to a million. … I think there’s going to be a lot of tension to decide how many resources they’re going to apply to that problem.”
The election results work to Trump’s benefit for the next step, which the official said ought to be adding cooperation agreements with counties across the country.
Under the Secure Communities program put into place in the aftermath of 9/11 during the George W. Bush administration, counties nationwide were encouraged to sign agreements with ICE that deputized local police to carry out some federal immigration duties, including immediately referring known illegal immigrants in jail for non-immigration offenses directly to ICE.
“Sanctuary” cities and counties are those that abandoned what was called 287(g) agreements and refuse to turn over people who are criminal illegal immigrants in local custody.
The heavy-red electoral map was evidence that “sheriffs in most of those counties would be happy to help the effort,” the second official said.
Detention and removal
Trump confirmed rumors last week that he plans to use the military to carry out a mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and he will declare a national emergency to get it done.
While each administration in recent history has called in the military to help at the southern border through tasks that do not include arresting illegal immigrants, no administration has carried out a singular deportation operation, much less with the help of the Armed Forces.
Service members are expected to pitch in but not active-duty military. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from serving outside its role and carrying out law enforcement duties, given that they are not law enforcers.
“Finding them and arresting them is going to take time, but it’s not going to be as difficult as: ‘Let’s find bed space and the ability to remove them,'” the first official said.
Having a way to transport as many people as are being arrested, detain them for days, weeks, or even months, and eventually fly them back to their home country or another that will accept them is a headache for those planning the operation. A shortage of buses for long-distance transports, and the ICE Air program’s only 13 leased 737 aircraft means it would need to call in big reinforcements.
“Where’s all that transportation going to come from? I think the military, who has buses, who can retrofit buses, they can turn that whole apparatus — military transportation apparatus — around. They can get buses, and they can put cages in them, and they can do that. I mean, they already have that. They have the capability to do that,” the first official said.
Military members cannot arrest people, but they have historically helped with transport operations, including for the past three years in Texas through the state’s border security initiative.
“Somebody’s looking into this right now, I guarantee it. And they’re going to try to figure out, ‘How can the military use planes? How can they use their robust transportation system?’ Think about how many planes the military has and the bases where they can refuel, they have crews,” the first official said.
ICE has space for 41,000 people to be detained at present. A Republican-controlled House and Senate could force through funding for 80,000 beds, which the first official said would meet the moment to get things started and then ramped up.
Pushback from the Left
The American Farm Bureau Federation has stayed quiet since Trump’s election, congratulating Trump on Nov. 6 but not commenting about the matter of losing countless workers in the fields nationwide.
Others, including farmers, have lambasted the forthcoming deportation, saying it will dry up the workforce that Americans depend on for groceries. A Center for Migration Studies report in 2022 estimated that 283,000 illegal immigrants work in agriculture.
Meanwhile, sanctuary cities have vowed to make it even harder for federal immigration authorities to arrest people within their limits, though the transition officials have said that arresting convicted criminals who harm the public is their priority, not everyday people who are illegally in the country.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and former New York City Police Department officer, has bucked the Democratic norm and indicated he is willing to work with Trump on the deportations.
“We want to get in the room and have one-on-one conversations and give them our view on what we believe what we’ve gone through, how our insight can assist them in some of the operational planning,” Adams said last week.
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But Adams’s strategy may be to his benefit, given that he is under indictment and has opposed Biden’s immigration policy. He recently met with Trump at a sporting event in New York City, possibly looking to talk about a pardon come January.
However, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) spent part of this month meeting with Biden administration officials in Washington, lobbying them for extra state spending to guard against actions by the Trump administration that it views out of line, such as the deportations.