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Government
data is notoriously slow. DHS has yet to publish its “Yearbook of
Immigration Statistics” for fiscal year 2024. Sadly, last fiscal year’s
data is completely unnecessary to demonstrate the point. From fiscal
year 2021 to 2023, at the very least 5,000,000 illegal immigrants
entered the country.
Over 3 million of these illegal migrants were allowed to enter the country despite encounters with or apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection on the southern border. DHS data shows
that from FY21 to FY23, U.S. Border Patrol released 1,888,220 illegal
immigrants from their custody. This figure includes individuals released
with a notice to appear, notice to report, or other terms. Over the
same period, 487,830 migrants received Office of Field Operations (OFO)
parole, a discretionary process that allows these migrants to enter the
U.S. after they have presented themselves at a port of entry. Migrants
who used the infamous CBP One App were frequent OFO parole recipients.
Another
747,230 migrants were transferred to ICE from FY21 to FY23, less than
half than what Border Patrol released into the country over the same
period. Chances are, more than half a million of those migrants were
released into the country—at least, if former DHS Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas is to be believed.
During a January 4, 2024 interview, Fox News Host Bret Baier asked Mayorkas the
following question: “Customs and Border Protection sources say that
currently, they are releasing more than 70 percent of the migrants
crossing every day and sometimes more than that number. Would that
surprise you?”
Mayorkas replied, “It would not surprise me at all.”
All
told, that’s about 3.1 million released into the country between FY21
and FY23—but that’s just the migrants encountered on the southern
border. Add more than 150,000 more after doing the same tabulations for
the northern border.
Then
there are the “gotaways,” the migrants CBP spotted crossing the border
but were unable to apprehend. In October 2023, right after the end of
the fiscal year, the House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on
Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement claimed in a report that
“more than 1.7 million known ‘gotaways’ have evaded Border Patrol and
escaped into the interior since January 20, 2021, with untold numbers of
unknown ‘gotaways’ avoiding detection during that period.” A later report from
the same Congressional entities, following a hearing in Texas featuring
then–Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, read, “When questioned regarding
the number of illegal alien ‘gotaways’ during testimony before Congress,
former Chief of the Border Patrol Raul Ortiz stated that the actual
number of ‘gotaways’ is ‘between 10 and 20 percent’ higher than the
total ‘gotaways’ reported. Therefore, the Committee estimates the total
number of ‘gotaways’ could be as high as 2.2 million under the
Biden-Harris Administration.” To keep the data fairly standardized,
let’s say the total is 20 percent higher than 1.7 million. That brings
the number of “gotaways” to just over 2 million.
That’s about 5.1 million all together—without counting hundreds of thousands of migrant children, new visa overstays, or broadening this assessment to Biden’s legally dubious parole programs.
Robert
Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who is
known in Washington as the man behind the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, has
done similar, more detailed math on Biden’s new voter base. Rector estimates that
between FY2021 and FY2023, the Biden administration illegally let in
6.7 million migrants. He has also tracked the economic devastation this
population is leaving in its wake.
“On
average, illegal aliens receive $2.40 in government benefits for each
$1.00 they pay in both direct and indirect taxes. The average illegal
alien household has an annual fiscal deficit over $20,000,” Rector
claims. “With a current population of 15.9 million illegal aliens,
provided above, the current net fiscal cost of those immigrants is
around $110 billion per year.”
America
faces two choices: mass deportations or mass amnesty. “Granting amnesty
to 15.9 million current illegal aliens would impose estimated total
lifetime net costs on the U.S. taxpayers of at least $5 trillion (in
constant 2023 dollars),” according to Rector. “This averages to around
$50,000 for each household currently paying federal income tax.” And
this calculator does not include the mass migration crisis that would
likely follow such an amnesty. Therefore, only mass deportations can at
least provide the possibility of a long-term solution.
“Achieving
1 million removals a year would be great, but we'll never be able to
simply deport our way out of the mess Biden and Mayorkas left,” Mark
Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies,
told The American Conservative. That helps explain “why
there's been such emphasis on getting people to leave on their own, two
steps ahead of ICE,” Krikorian said, referencing various programs DHS
has established to incentivize migrants to self-deport.
Lora
Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The
Heritage Foundation, believes “at least 11 million” illegal immigrants
entered the United States during the Biden administration. “Pre-Biden,
the estimated annual number of illegal aliens in the US ranged from 11
million to at least 20 million,” Ries told TAC. “Then, Biden added
another at least 11 million, bringing the estimated total to 22 million
to 31 million.”
That
said, 1 million annual deportations does not cut it for Ries.
“Deporting 4 million deportable aliens over four years is not enough,”
she said. “Several million per year should be the target to get to the
goal of having a lawful, orderly, and manageable immigration system.”
So, what problems did Congress need to tackle with that $150 billion to increase the rate of deportations to 1 million per year?
According
to the Department of Homeland Security, moving a single illegal
immigrant through the removal system, from their arrest, to their
detainment, to their eventual deportation, costs $17,121. If Congress
were dealing with a linear scale, then $150 billion investment would
result in almost 8.82 million deportations per year. I suggest 8.82
million even though the funding falls over a 10 year period because
these investments focus heavily on expanding capacity—through
infrastructure and personnel—with costs that are either front-loaded or
relatively stable over the course of employment. But that is exactly why
Congress is not dealing with a linear scale when investing in
immigration enforcement. Physical and logistical bottlenecks throughout
the deportation pipeline create major choke points that limit the volume
of illegal migrants the system can process.
Responsibility
over the immigration enforcement provisions of the bill were divided
between the House Judiciary Committee and the House Homeland Security
Committee, chaired by Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Green of
Tennessee, respectively.
The
Homeland Security Committee has jurisdiction over border security and
enforcement operations. Its budget reconciliation recommendations, the CBO claims,
run a $67.1 billion price tag over the next ten years. These
expenditures are devoted solely to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA, however, receives
less than $3 billion of the total.
Which
leaves more than $64 billion to the CBP. The big beautiful bill gives
the big beautiful wall (and other countermeasures) $46.5 billion.
Whether the wall will actually get 10 feet taller remains to be seen,
but with previous estimates of wall construction costing $20 million per mile,
the bill would fund hundreds of miles of new border wall. Another $14.6
billion is for new CBP personnel, vehicles, and technology.
But
it’s the Judiciary Committee’s immigration provisions that
predominantly deal with deportations. The Judiciary Committee’s
jurisdiction over immigration issues focuses on the procedural aspects
of immigration. It oversees laws relating to visas, asylum, deportation,
as well as immigration courts and judges.
The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) review of
the House Judiciary Committee’s budget reconciliation recommendations
claims the immigration provisions amounted to more than $82 billion in
expenditures over the 10-year budget reconciliation window. The funding
aims to relieve critical bottlenecks in the system, including limited
detention capacity, transportation constraints, and the overburdened,
backlogged immigration court system.
Though
the funding is divided between DHS, HHS, and the DOJ, ICE was the big
winner in the Judiciary Committee’s recommendations. The committee
marked more than $70 billion for the law enforcement agency tasked with
deporting the nation’s illegals.
Homeland
Security Chairman Green told TAC the funding is “need[ed] to provide a
substantial boost in resources to ICE to arrest, detain, and remove the
millions of illegal aliens residing in our country.”
“After
years of being held back from enforcing the law, despite House
Republican efforts in the 118th Congress to fund their mission, we are
going to have to ramp up spending to get ICE the personnel and resources
it needs,” Green continued.
More
than half of that funding, $45 billion, is for ICE to increase its
detention capacity. Right now, ICE is able to hold about 41,500
detainees on average, though the Trump administration has surpassed that
capacity and filled detention centers to the brim. In mid-March, for
example, ICE had 47,600 migrants in
the detention system. Using the March figure, ICE would have to turn
over its detention capacity 21 times in a single year to hit 1,000,000
deportations.
The
low level of detention capacity relative to migrant flows has been a
major obstacle for policy-makers and created bottlenecks for decades.
“There's no point in arresting illegals and then letting them go because
you don’t have anywhere to park them while you work on their travel
documents to be able to send them home,” Krikorian said, explaining the
broader effects of limited detention capacity. It was necessary for
Republicans to fund “a significant expansion of detention capacity” to
deliver on Trump’s promises.
Trump’s
border czar, Tom Homan, appears to agree with Krikorian. In December
2024, Homan claimed ICE would need at least 100,000 detention beds for
mass deportations, which is precisely what House Republicans delivered
with the $45 billion in additional funding. While 100,000 beds is more
than double the current figure, ICE would still have to completely turn
over its migrant population 10 times to hit the benchmark. Admittedly,
this is not the only process by which the federal government can deport
migrants, but it illustrates the point: Even though the Trump
administration has been able to bring down the average duration of a
migrant in custody from 52 to 46 days, that improved average detention time falls short of being able to turn over the detained migrant population 10 times a year.
The
Judiciary Committee also provided ICE with an additional $14.4 billion
to transport and remove these illegal migrants, an issue that often goes
hand in glove with detention capacity limitations. Transporting
detainees to ICE facilities, or between ICE facilities when a particular
facility hits capacity constraints, is necessary to grease the skids on
removing illegal aliens. With so many migrants dispersed throughout the
interior—into cities like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis—instead of
remaining concentrated near the southern border, the cost of
transporting them by bus, van, or chartered flight for their relocation
and eventual removal rises significantly. Furthermore, delays in
transferring migrants within the detention system can lead to longer
detention periods and fewer deportations. CBP spent over $41 million on
immigration-related transportation costs in FY23. Because of the volume
of migrants, however, it still was not enough. CBP entered into short-term contracts to “decompress” the system.
Another
$10.7 billion is for expanding ICE personnel: $8 billion for additional
staffing, $1.32 billion for additional ICE attorneys, and another $1.4
billion for recruitment and retention. The House Judiciary Committee
claims this will provide enough funding “to hire 10,000 new ICE officers
and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) criminal investigators.” ICE
personnel will also have better capital at their disposal. Upgrades—for
the agency’s technology, vehicles, and facilities—will cost another
$1.5 billion. A little more than that will be devoted to combating human
trafficking and immigration enforcement agreements with local
governments.
The
Judiciary committee also allocated $3.1 billion to the care of
unaccompanied migrant children. If the treatment of migrant children
created turbulence for Trump in his first term, it was a complete
tipping point for the Biden administration—somehow, they misplaced
nearly 300,000 migrant children. The $3.1 billion is mostly for HHS, but
DHS gets a slice of the pie as well.
Perhaps
the biggest chokepoint of them all, however, is the immigration court
system, officially named the Executive Office for Immigration Review
(EOIR). EOIR, a sub-agency of the DOJ that oversees the immigration
court system, would receive $1.25 billion if the House version of the
reconciliation package became law.
Ries
told TAC that funding to radically expand the number of immigration
judges remains a major priority because “DOJ currently has over 3.6
million cases in its immigration court backlog,” which is almost double
the 1.9 million case backlog Biden inherited at the beginning of his
term. For the fiscal year that followed, the approximately 700
immigration judges across the 71 immigration courts and adjudication
centers, which process on average between 500 to 600 cases per year, issued 666,177 initial case decisions.
The
Trump administration has had to balance processing these claims with
its priority to reclaim government from the bureaucratic class. Because
these immigration judges are part of the DOJ, the Trump administration
fired more than 20 immigration judges within the first month. Another
100 individuals employed by the immigration courts were laid off,
retired early, or took a deal to step away.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has started chipping away at the logjam. The Washington Times reported
that March 2025 was the first time since FY2008 that the number of
pending immigration cases declined. That month, immigration judges
processed more than 60,000 immigration cases while DHS added fewer than
30,000 new ones. Through March, the administration had decreased the
backlog by 115,000. If a 30,000 month-over-month reduction in the
immigration courts’ caseload became the new normal, it would still take
over 11 years for the immigration courts to get through the docket.
For the past decade, Congress has estimated that an additional immigration judge, including support staff and other needs, costs about $1 million,
which means the additional $1.25 billion could set up over 1,000 new
immigration judges. Even with an increase of this magnitude, however,
working through the backlog would still take years beyond Trump’s term:
The Congressional Research Service issued a report in July 2023 that an
additional 700 immigration judges to work through the case backlog by
fiscal year 2032.
It
would be an understatement to say President Donald Trump spiked the
football on the “haters and losers” in his address to Congress on March
4. “The media and our friends in the Democrat party kept saying we
needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border.
But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president,” Trump
declared.
Trump’s
declaration was not without good reason. In February 2025, the month
before the speech, CBP had only 11,709 migrant encounters, which
averages out to about 418 encounters per day. When contacted about the
border crossing and deportation figures, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia
McLaughlin told The American Conservative, “Under Secretary
Noem, we are delivering on President Trump's and the American people's
mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America
safe.”
February’s
figures, at the time CBP’s “lowest month in recorded history,” marked
an 80 percent decrease from January 2025, the month the U.S.
foreign-born population hit a record high, and an almost 90 percent
decline from October 2024.
While the president does not need more legislation, he does need more cash.
The American Immigration Council, a left of center think-tank, has put the price tag of at least $315 billion to remove 13 million illegal immigrants.
Of
course, that’s more than double the amount the House version of the
big, beautiful bill provides. Though it narrowly passed in the House,
the big, beautiful bill remains Republicans’ best shot at codifying
broad swaths of the Trump agenda, and it’s not too late for Republicans
to make changes. WIth the bill now in the Senate’s hands, high-ranking
Republican senators have spent the Memorial Day recess quietly putting
together its own version of the reconciliation package. As was the case
during the House negotiations, Medicaid, SALT, government spending cuts,
and the debt limit hike are likely to dominate the headlines while the
Senate puts together its product.
Though
GOP Senate leaders have been working alongside their House colleagues
during the formation of the bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has
affirmed “the Senate will have its imprint on it.”
While
the president has repeatedly affirmed his desire for the Senate to act
quickly, the Senate GOP will be negotiating amongst themselves with the
president’s blessing. “I want the Senate and the senators to make the
changes they want. It will go back to the House and we’ll see if we can
get them. In some cases, those changes may be something I’d agree with,”
Trump said. “I think they are going to have changes. Some will be
minor, some will be fairly significant.”
But
maybe it’s worth the Senate’s time to take a hard look at the big,
beautiful bill’s immigration provisions to further increase the number
of deportations Trump can accomplish in the next four years because, in
Krikorian’s words, 1,000,000 is “an ambitious goal, but not
pie-in-the-sky.” If past is prologue, the Senate could have an appetite
to do just that. “The Senate had much higher dollar amounts earlier in
this reconciliation process for ICE and CBP,” Ries told TAC.
Prominent
House Republicans, like Green, are open to the Senate boosting
immigration funding. “We have to work within the rules of the budget
resolution that kickstarted the reconciliation process, which the House
was very careful to do,” Green told TAC.
It
can’t stop there, though. “One million deportations per year should be
viewed as an absolute floor. At a minimum, the Senate should not make
any cuts to the border security and immigration enforcement provisions
we passed in the House,” said Green. “If they are able to plus them up
while staying compliant with the fiscal rules of the reconciliation
process, they should do so.”
Sen.
Mike Lee of Utah told TAC that, while the Senate might have that
desire, there may be procedural and political limitations on what the
upper chamber can do with the big, beautiful bill. “The deportations
required to turn back the clock on the Biden invasion—let alone decades
of prior lax enforcement—are going to require great levels of support
for ICE agents, Border Patrol, repatriation flights, and more. Of all
the things the federal government is spending money on, we should
absolutely appropriate the necessary funds to let these courageous men
and women do their jobs,” Lee said.
Nevertheless,
Lee added that, “taking the Byrd rule into account, I think it would be
challenging for us to be more aggressive than the House. To its credit,
the reconciliation bill holistically addresses every facet of the
immigration system in order to super charge deportations and address the
issues that Biden left behind. We should also ensure that the tax on
remittances stays in the bill—it is very important to dissuade people
from coming here just to send money back to their home country.” The big
beautiful bill’s remittance tax in the House version wound up being 3.5
percent, though at one time, rumors around Capitol Hill said it was
going to be 10 percent.
If
this is Republicans’ best shot, they have to take it. “We have a
willing executive branch, and they’re going to get the funding they
need,” Lee told TAC.
But
Green told TAC this is not their only shot, and their immigration work
is far from over. “Reconciliation is just the beginning,” Green said.
“We will need to continue the momentum of President Trump’s ‘One Big,
Beautiful Bill’ through the appropriations process, and codifying the
President’s border security policies into law.”
Green
is imploring Congress “to make changes to make the Immigration and
Nationality Act more explicit in what it allows and disallows.”
Additionally, Green said, “we need to define specific limits for parole.
Nationality based parole programs should be prohibited. We should make
it harder for illegal border crossers to claim asylum. We have to do
something about the Flores Settlement Agreement, which has led to the
mass trafficking of unaccompanied minors in recent years. There are many
changes we can make to the law to prevent future crises and make our
system more secure and sensible.”
Republican
efforts to create a sensible immigration system haven’t stopped the
judiciary from trying to hamstring Trump at every turn. Lee agreed with
Green that Congress’ work to end the border crisis is far from over, but
also suggested Congress take a bold and interesting move.
“The
biggest roadblock continues to be judges cosplaying as the President,
and interfering with his legitimate orders,” he said. “We’re seeing this
gradually resolved as cases trickle up to the Supreme Court, but if the
problem continues, Congress should remove certain cases from district
court jurisdiction.”
As
Missouri’s Sen. Eric Schmitt recently told me in an interview, “mass
migration needs to be met with mass deportations.” Trump wasn’t just
elected to plug the holes. He was elected to drain the bilge. |