President Donald Trump’s pledge to launch America’s largest deportation operation could face hurdles and could cost nearly $1 trillion over a decade, immigration experts and former officials warn.
The American Immigration Council estimates that deporting 11 million unauthorized immigrants would require building 216 new detention facilities yearly for more than a decade, each costing $36 million to build and $48 million annually to operate.
“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,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, said to the Financial Times.
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Early enforcement actions show the scale of the challenge. ICE arrested 956 people Sunday, the largest single-day total under the new administration. Yet even at the heightened pace, deportations would fall far short of Trump’s targets.
Immigration facilities already strain under current operations. ICE can detain 41,500 people at once, while border czar Tom Homan says he needs “at least 100,000 beds” to meet the administration’s goals.
“It’s not like you just flip a switch and immediately start rounding people up and sending them to the border,” John Torres, former ICE acting director during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said to the Financial Times.
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Current deportation numbers—271,484 in fiscal 2024—pale against Trump’s million-plus annual target.
The court system presents another bottleneck. Immigration courts face a 3.6-million-case backlog, up from 656,000 in 2017. Most deportations require court proceedings unless immigrants have existing removal orders.
Private prison companies like GEO Group GEO and CoreCivic Inc. CXW have seen their stock prices surge since the election. CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger said his company could quadruple its current 10,000-bed capacity within six months, but building and staffing new facilities would strain federal resources.
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Republicans promise $100 billion for border security and enforcement, but experts say it falls far short. Former ICE Chief of Staff Jason Houser said, “There is no way they have the staff, the money and the resources and the legal authority” for mass deportations.
The plan faces additional resistance from “sanctuary” jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. While Trump threatens to withhold federal funding from those areas, similar attempts during his first term were blocked by courts.
Constitutional hurdles also loom. The administration’s expanded “expedited removal” policy, allowing deportations without court review for those who can’t prove two years of U.S. residency, already faces legal challenges.
The American Civil Liberties Union calls it a “cheat code to circumvent due process and the constitution.”
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