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WE’RE ABOUT TO FIND OUT WHAT MASS DEPORTATION REALLY LOOKS LIKE  
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Nick Miroff
April 16, 2025
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_ The Trump administration’s campaign to remove millions of people
from the United States could soon be supercharged by Congress. _

Salvadoran police officers escort alleged members of the Venezuelan
gang Tren de Aragua recently deported by the US to be imprisoned in a
prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador., El Salvador’s Presidency Press
Office/Handout/Reuters

 

The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that
its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past
several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the
streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison
in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams
administration.

The tactics have spread fear and created a showreel of
social-media-ready highlights for the White House. But they have not
brought U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement much closer to
delivering the “millions” of deportations President Donald Trump
has set as a goal.

“We need more money,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” told
me in an interview. “We won’t fail if we get the resources we
need.”

Using the budget-reconciliation process, Republican lawmakers are now
preparing to lavish ICE with a colossal funding increase—enough to
pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the
United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about
achieving.

Although GOP factions in the House and Senate have squabbled over the
contours of the bill, spending heavily on immigration enforcement has
bicameral support. The reconciliation bill in the Senate would provide
$175 billion over the next decade. A House version proposes $90
billion.

To put those sums in perspective, the entire annual budget of ICE is
about $9 billion.

The funding surge—which Republicans could approve without a single
Democratic vote—would allow ICE to add thousands of officers and
enlist police and sheriff’s deputies across the country to help
arrest and jail more immigrants. It would funnel billions to private
contractors to identify and locate targets, jail them in for-profit
detention centers, and fast-track their deportations.

Paul Hunker, who was formerly ICE’s lead attorney in Dallas, likened
Trump’s deportation campaign to a gathering wave. “It seems
intense now, but wait until five months from now when the
reconciliation bill has passed and ICE gets a huge infusion of
cash,’’ he told me. “If that money goes out, the amount of
people they can arrest and remove will be extraordinary.’’

ICE officials envision a private-sector contracting bonanza that would
rely on old workhorses such as CoreCivic and Geo Group-–the
for-profit firms best known for running immigration jails—while
enlisting large data companies to make the deportation system run more
like an e-commerce platform.

This was a theme of ICE’s message to industry leaders at a
border-security expo in Arizona last week. Keynote speakers included
Homan, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and
acting ICE Director Todd Lyons.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,’’ said
Lyons, who added that he wanted a deportation system that would work
like Amazon Prime “but with human beings.’’ His comments,
first reported
[[link removed]] by
the _Arizona Mirror_, drew condemnations from immigrant-advocacy
groups.

Homan, who works out of ICE headquarters in Washington and enjoys
direct access to the president, has insisted that the agency would
prioritize criminals and gang members during the initial phase of the
deportation campaign. Although plenty of noncriminals
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already been targeted, the ratio will likely shift further toward
people who have been living in the United States without attracting
notice from law enforcement. Homan has likened his approach to a
camera lens, saying that, with more funding, ICE can expand its
“aperture” to include a broader range of immigrants. Anyone living
in the United States without legal status will be fair game.

Since the inauguration, ICE has been under intense White House
pressure to boost its deportation numbers. The agency remains hampered
by financial and logistical constraints, and the administration’s
deportation math is as fuzzy as its tariff formulas. ICE has
essentially been told to remove four times as many immigrants as it
did last year—to reach 1 million annually—without, at least so
far, a corresponding increase in staffing or resources.

ICE carried out about 18,500 deportations in March, according to
unpublished ICE data I obtained. That is down from 23,100 in March
2024, when illegal border crossings were much higher, giving ICE more
easy-to-deport migrants. At the current rate, deportations are on pace
to decline—not increase—during Trump’s first year in office.

With ICE unable to pad its stats with easy border removals, and
sanctuary jurisdictions limiting the agency’s access to jails in
cities with large immigrant populations, the path to 1 million
deportations is steep. Finding and arresting immigration violators in
U.S. cities and communities is the slowest and most resource-intensive
way for ICE to operate.

Chad Wolf, who was an acting DHS secretary during Trump’s first
administration and now works at the Trump-aligned America First Policy
Institute, said a major cash injection from Congress will supercharge
ICE.

“Once the funding is there, it’ll be a question of
execution,’’ he told me. “There are many other steps it will
take, but resources will no longer be the issue.’’

The pool of potential deportees may be 10 million or more. Trump
officials have been lining up the next phase of their campaign by
smashing the safeguards that some federal agencies have traditionally
used to wall off sensitive personal information from the eyes of ICE.

The Internal Revenue Service, bowing to White House pressure, agreed
this month to share
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the Department of Homeland Security confidential data including the
names and addresses of as many as 7 million immigrants who have been
paying taxes despite lacking legal residency status. The IRS has long
offered taxpayer-ID numbers to workers who lack U.S. legal status but
wish to create a paper trail
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faithful tax-paying in the hope that it would benefit their
immigration cases. (Such workers cumulatively pay about $60 billion a
year, according
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the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.) The
arrangement worked because the IRS kept the data confidential.

The Trump administration has been trying to enlist other federal
agencies that previously kept ICE at arm’s length. Elon Musk’s
DOGE team is helping ICE search for immigration violators by
collecting data at Health and Human Services and the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, _The Washington Post_ reported
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Millions of other deportation candidates are easier to find. In recent
weeks the Trump administration has been trying to revoke the legal
status of nearly 1.5 million immigrants who arrived during the Biden
administration with a form of provisional residency known as parole.
Another million or so who are living and working legally with
temporary protected status are at risk of having their status revoked
if the Trump administration prevails against legal challenges.

The two groups add up to about 2.5 million people whose names,
addresses and other personal data are already known to DHS and ICE.
The department has also threatened to charge foreigners with criminal
violations if they do not register
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provide fingerprints within 30 days of arrival.

Tracking down people who are eligible for deportation and moving them
out is the logistical puzzle confronting Homan. He said he wants to
enlist private companies to optimize ICE enforcement.

ICE officers have been spending too much time on “targeting,”
Homan told me, which is the process of identifying deportation
candidates and researching their daily routines so that officers
don’t come up empty when they try to make an arrest. ICE teams
can’t force their way into a residence without a judicial warrant,
so they try to determine when the person they want to grab typically
leaves for work, or drops off kids at school. Then they can try to
catch them in the open.

This is one example of the kind of data research Homan would like to
hand off to private contractors. Reached by phone a day after the
Arizona security conference, he sounded like someone who’d been
listening to pitches from management consultants and data firms.

“You got all these companies out there that say they can help with
targeting,’’ Homan said, mentioning firms such as Palantir and
Deloitte, neither of which responded to inquiries. “There are a lot
of smart people who can help cops be more efficient at what they’re
doing.’’

ICE last week made a $30 million upgrade to its contract with the
Denver-based data giant Palantir “to deploy new Targeting and
Enforcement Prioritization, Self-Deportation Tracking, and Immigration
Lifecycle Process capabilities,” federal contracting records show
[[link removed]].
It follows a separate modification last month for the company “to
support complete target analysis of known populations.’’

Laura Rivera, an attorney who tracks contracts between tech companies
and the Department of Homeland Security for the Just Futures Law
project, attended the border-security expo and told me the message
from Trump officials was that they are seeking to hire contractors to
do “every task that doesn’t necessitate a badge and a gun.”

That includes social-media monitoring, immigration case management and
the use of cellphone data
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locate targets for arrest. The companies offering those services
‘’are looking to be the right hand of Trump in carrying out mass
deportations,’’ she said.

Homan says his task is to reverse-engineer the record influx that
occurred during the first three years of the Biden administration,
when illegal border crossings averaged 2 million per year, the highest
levels ever recorded. To reach industrial scale, ICE needs to think
more like a logistics company than a law-enforcement agency, Homan
said, “kind of like DHS or FedEx.’’

‘’How do we get people from numerous locations across the country?
What’s the most efficient way to get them to a flight?’’ he
asked.

Brad Youngman, the sheriff of Daviess County, Kentucky, told me he was
somewhat surprised this month to see his department show up on an ICE
website listing jurisdictions that have agreed to help the Trump
administration arrest and deport more immigrants. Daviess County, a
farming area along the Ohio River, is one of nearly 450 jurisdictions
on the list, which is dominated by counties and police departments in
Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has led a push to make
the agreements mandatory.

Youngman said a friend at ICE had encouraged him to sign up for the
partner program, known as 287(g) for its section in U.S. immigration
law, but he hasn’t fully committed yet. Federal task forces are a
trade-off, Youngman reasoned, and he’s not sure yet whether his
county will benefit from having deputies doing immigration work if it
detracts from routine law enforcement or seems overzealous.

“I’ve got a lot of problems here that I need to focus on, so I’d
like to hear more information,” Youngman told me. “I'm not
necessarily looking to ruin people’s lives who are up here looking
for a better way of life.”

Expanding the 287(g) program is crucial to Trump’s mass-deportation
plan. It would allow the administration to deputize officers across
the country for the deportation effort, and funnel federal money to
states and counties politically aligned with the White House’s
goals. Jurisdictions could apply for federal grants that would pay for
vehicles, technology, overtime hours and more.

Trump won Daviess County by 32 percentage points in November, but
Youngman’s ambivalence is not out of the ordinary in conservative
districts whose economies are heavily dependent on immigrant labor,
law-enforcement experts told me.

Kiernan Donahue, the sheriff of Canyon County, Idaho, and the current
president of the National Sheriff’s Association, said he has balked
at joining ICE’s task force, even though he supports Trump’s
enforcement agenda. “I don’t have the manpower,” he told me. If
his deputies made more immigration arrests, he would have nowhere to
hold them. The county jail facility he manages is full: “I have no
bed space.”

Homan and ICE officials have been laying the groundwork for the next
phase of the deportation campaign as they wait for congressional
Republicans to deliver the money to pay for it. The administration has
solicited contract proposals for a $45 billion expansion of
immigration-detention capacity over the next two years, a request
first reported
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New York Times_. Separate ICE documents released through a lawsuit
filed by the American Civil Liberties Union show
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the agency wants to add detention space in 10 states across the
Midwest and West Coast.

ICE has the funding to pay for about 40,000 detainees a day, and is
currently holding nearly 49,000, the latest agency data show. Homan
has said he wants to boost detention capacity to more than 100,000.

In one sign of ICE’s ambitions, the agency has been looking to
repurpose tent facilities along the Mexico border that were used
extensively during the Biden administration as emergency processing
sites for migrants. The facilities were the first stop for many of the
millions allowed to pursue U.S. humanitarian protection during Joe
Biden’s presidency. ICE will now run the process in reverse, and
convert the tents into makeshift jails for detainees awaiting
deportation.

_Nick Miroff [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The Atlantic who covers immigration, the Department
of Homeland Security and the U.S.-Mexico border. He can be reached on
Signal at NickMiroff.78_

* mass deportation
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* Donald Trump
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* Congressional Authorization
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