Trump touts historic deportation plans, but his own record reveals big obstacles

At the Republican National Convention this summer, hundreds of attendees waved signs demanding “Mass Deportation Now!”

When former President Donald Trump took the stage on the final night of the convention, he promised to launch “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” if reelected.

Trump’s deportation pledge has become a familiar theme of his 2024 campaign, repeated often by the former president at his rallies, in the official Republican Party platform and in his recent conversation with billionaire X owner Elon Musk.

But the Trump administration’s own track record reveals why that will be difficult, if not impossible, to execute.

Internal emails and documents obtained by NPR through a Freedom of Information Act request offer a window into how immigration authorities scrambled from the first days of the Trump administration to scale up their detention capacity in response to requests from the White House. At the same time, they reveal how bureaucratic hurdles slowed the process, limiting the administration’s ability to ramp up immigration enforcement to match the administration’s rhetoric.

Ambitious enforcement plans for a second term

There are 11 million unauthorized migrants in the U.S., according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Immigration observers say it would be really challenging to remove all of them, particularly because migrants are spread throughout the country and many have lived in the country for decades and have started families.

Unauthorized migrants also fuel the U.S. economy by paying billions of dollars in local and state taxes, the American Immigration Council reported in June.

Still, Trump and running mate JD Vance have pushed for mass deportations and have falsely claimed that up to 20 million unauthorized migrants are living in the United States.

They have not been specific about how they plan to carry out their plan, but at least Vance has recognized it might be challenging.

“You start with what’s achievable,” Vance said in an interview with ABC News that aired Sunday. “You cannot have a border unless you’re willing to deport some people. I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million.”

But Trump and his allies have talked openly about deporting millions more, including migrants who have been in the country for decades, such as the spouses of U.S. citizens and others whom Biden has tried to shield through executive actions.

Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser for Trump, said in a November interview with the conservative Charlie Kirk Show that Trump’s mass deportation plan “involves building large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas, because of the existing infrastructure there.”

ICE’s strategy of seeking additional bed space from private detention companies predates the Trump administration.

In emails from October 2016, months before Trump took office, ICE officials wrote in an email that they were “in dire need for detention beds to respond to an immigration crisis on the Southern border,” and they reached out to private detention companies to discuss available bed space.

“Tempted? Anything that GEO has proposed interests you/ICE?” an ICE detention official wrote to Johnson in an email in September 2016. (That official’s name, like many of the names in the emails and documents NPR obtained, was redacted by ICE attorneys.)

Still, no previous administration had expanded the use of private detention facilities as quickly as the Trump administration.

By February 2017, less than a month after Trump took office as president, ICE had identified more than 30 detention facilities in more than a dozen states, ranging from small county and parish jails to large detention facilities. Many facilities on that list did eventually hold detainees for ICE, though in some cases it took months or even years before the contracts were completed and signed.

“In the government, sometimes it’s designed not to move quickly,” said Ron Vitiello, a former acting ICE director under Trump during 2018 and 2019, in an interview with NPR. “It’s hard to get from where you are to where you want to be in a rapid pace.”

There was additional pressure to add detention space to help move migrants quickly out of short-term holding facilities operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Vitiello said, which were overflowing because of a jump in the number of border apprehensions.

ICE held regular meetings “to figure out what the resource picture looked like, what available beds were out there,” Vitiello said. “It was a full-court press in the sense of seeing what was available that needed new contracting, expanding current contracts.”

Thousands of detention beds were available to ICE at the time as the Department of Justice phased out the use of private detention facilities and as some states moved to shorter sentences and more frequent use of parole for low-level offenders.

Some facilities, like the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Miss., had formerly held inmates for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. But the Justice Department declined to renew that contract as it scaled back its use of private prisons in 2016.

Other prisons were vacant because of declines in the inmate population in Texas and Louisiana.

In March 2018, a senior vice president at the GEO Group whose name was redacted by ICE wrote to ICE’s Johnson “regarding the availability of our idle 1,000 bed South Louisiana Processing Center” in Basile, Louisiana. The facility could be opened in as little as 45 days, GEO said, as it worked to expedite security clearances for its staff.

Sometimes, local officials approached ICE directly seeking a tenant for their vacant detention space. That was the case in Anson, Texas, a small town about a two and a half hours’ drive from Fort Worth, where county officials had built a prison with the expectation that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice would hold inmates there. But the department pulled out in 2010, leaving the facility vacant for years — until county judge Dale Spurgin called ICE.

Caught off guard, immigration authorities scrambled to make good on those warnings. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates and Democratic leaders in cities across the country vowed to protect unauthorized immigrants in their midst. In the end, no mass arrests or deportations materialized.

Some former ICE officials believe Trump and his allies are once again threatening more than they can deliver when they promise the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

“The cynic in me would say that’s a political statement, not really a practical statement,” said Saldaña, the former ICE director, that’s designed to appeal to people “who like the idea of coming in and kicking people out of the country.”

In reality, Saldaña says, any effort to remove all the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. would face enormous legal and practical challenges.

Many of those immigrants are living in the shadows and have never had any contact with immigration authorities. So even if ICE were able to find and arrest them, they could be entitled to contest their removal before an immigration judge. But that process can take years because of lengthy backlogs in immigration courts.

“It’s a morass of regulations, government cooperation, in order to try to get somebody back into their country,” said Saldaña. “The logistics are not simple.”

Moreover, immigrant advocates say removing millions of unauthorized immigrants at once would have a devastating effect on communities and families — including millions of mixed-status families that include U.S. citizens and lawful residents — and would likely hurt the U.S. economy in the process.

It’s possible that a second Trump administration could choose to focus its enforcement efforts on the more than 2.5 million migrants who’ve been allowed into the U.S. to seek asylum during the Biden administration. Many of them are legally present in the country while they await their asylum hearings in immigration court — though most lack any kind of permanent legal status.

Some of Trump’s allies say those recent arrivals should be taking his threats of mass deportation seriously.

“As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden released in our country in violation of federal law,” Homan, the former ICE acting director, told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention last month. “You better start packing now. You’re damn right. ‘Cause you’re going home.”