In the waning days of President Donald Trump’s first administration, migrant caravans surged northward. The migrants themselves admitted they were coming in anticipation of President Joe Biden’s inauguration and the Democrat president’s pledge to pause deportations and end Remain in Mexico. The former Vice President Kamala Harris’s plea of “do not come” had little effect beyond the memes it generated.

It’s much easier for an incoming Democratic administration to open the floodgates than it is for an incoming Republican administration to close them. Yet Trump managed to tighten the tap significantly even before taking the oath of office. In October 2024, a month prior to the November election but in the middle of Biden’s extended lame duck period, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported 106,321 total migrant encounters at the Southwest border. That’s more than 3,429 per day. In January 2025, the month Hurricane Trump hit Washington, DC for the second time, CBP encounters had fallen by more than 42 percent: 61,448 crossings, averaging out to just under 2,000 per day.

The same month Trump made his triumphant return, however, a bombshell piece of news came out of—of all places—the Census Bureau. The bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) for January 2025 found that America’s foreign-born population hit a record-high 53.3 million. That is a record in percentage terms as well: Legal and illegal migrants made up at least 15.8 percent of the U.S. population, a full percentage point higher than the previous record set in 1910.

The CPS results must have been shocking for the Census Bureau, given that only two years ago the bureau projected the foreign-born population would not hit 15.8 percent until the year 2042. Perhaps these findings were not so surprising to critics of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, Trump included: Over Biden’s four years in office, the foreign-born population living in the United States increased by 8.3 million on net. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that for the foreign-born population to increase that margin, around 12 million new illegal and legal migrants had to enter the country during Biden’s tenure. And that estimate must be on the lower side because of the difficulties associated with mapping America’s massive illegal immigrant population and the incentive structure for our nation’s trespassers to be less than truthful when asked about their legal status.

Congress now believes it is in the process of providing the president with the resources the Trump administration needs to deliver on mass deportations. In the House version of the budget reconciliation package, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans allocated approximately $150 billion to immigration enforcement. According to the House Judiciary Committee, the House version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will be enough to fund 1 million—1,000,000—deportations annually.

But is a million deportations per year enough?

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.”

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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.