There are an estimated 11-14 million undocumented immigrants in the country, all of whom Trump has promised to deport. There are millions more with temporary protected status and other mechanisms allowing them to stay legally, who Trump has also promised to deport. (Among the first targets were Cubans and Venezuelans—two reliably Republican groups.)
As noted before, Trump’s promises are patently unrealistic, leading Tom Homan, his border czar, to already try and walk them back. The reality is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement lacks the personnel to make any serious dent in that number absent significant local support, and the hundreds of billions it would take to staff up are hundreds of billions that simply don’t exist in any realistic budget, especially with the GOP’s razor-thin congressional majorities.
Trump’s first week deportation numbers bear that out.
ICE has started bragging about their daily arrest numbers on X.
January 26: 956
January 25: 286
January 24: 593
January 23: 538
That’s an average of just under 600 a day. There are 1,452 days left in the Trump presidency, so at that rate, assuming all those arrests turn into deportations (many won’t), he would manage to deport 861,629 immigrants.
Funny enough, that would be a lower number than former President Joe Biden managed to deport. In 2024, ICE deported 271,484 immigrants, or around 744 per day.
Imagine if Biden was an asshole and had ICE post daily social media updates on the number of deportations. Would he get credit for it? Would Republicans be like, “oooh, he’s doing a great job!”
Of course not, but Trump makes a big show of 600 arrests and the MAGA deplorables are ecstatic. Here is Fox News breathlessly reporting that “deportation flights have begun” as Trump sends a “strong and clear message,” as if it’s some new never-before-seen initiative.
ICE’s problem is one of scale. ICE has only 6,000 agents, and U.S. Border Patrol only has 20,000, but 17,000 of them patrol the border. As Trump’s former Border Patrol commissioner Mark Morgan said in an interview with Stateline, “It’s not going to be successful, as long as we have sanctuary cities and states that refuse to allow local and state police departments to work with ICE.”
Trump would be best served by using his friends in Texas, Florida, and Nebraska to go after undocumented immigrants in those states, but for now he seems hell-bent on punishing blue cities and states like Newark, New Jersey, where an ICE raid picked up a U.S. citizen who was also a veteran. That epic screwup got all the attention, but the contours of that raid demonstrate the challenges federal authorities face.
Newark is a sanctuary city, and the state of New Jersey itself refuses to work with federal authorities on immigration matters. So ICE had to go in without the assistance of local law enforcement. According to reports, about a dozen agents raided a fish market, and they managed to pick up just three immigrants and the veteran who failed to provide identification. You need proportionately more law enforcement agents than the people you hope to nab. At that rate, it’s obvious why ICE would need to be dramatically expanded to move beyond 1 million deportations, much less the millions (plural) Trump has promised.
Trump himself is upset at that pace, according to at least one new report.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been directed by Trump officials to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation campaign so far, according to four people with knowledge of the briefings,” reported The Washington Post.
The only way to do that without massively increasing the size of ICE (which has to be budgeted and hired) is to focus on red state immigrants, decimating local economies and raising food prices everywhere.
Good luck with that, Donnie.
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