Trump Says He Wants to Deport Millions. He’ll Have a Hard Time Removing More People Than Biden Has.

If you go to Tijuana, right up to the border wall, you can see a deportation in its final throes. At the edge of a Mexican freeway that runs along the border, there’s a nondescript metal door. On any given morning, a Mexican official will open the padlock on the Mexican side and an American immigration agent will open the padlock on the U.S. side. Then, dozens—sometimes hundreds — of people get pushed back into Mexico. Some wander to shelters; others end up camping just outside the door, as if staying close by might improve their chances of getting back in. That deportation door got plenty of use under Donald Trump. But perhaps no president has used it more than Joe Biden.

You wouldn’t have guessed that watching Trump’s 92-minute speech at the Republican National Convention earlier this month, where Trump brutalized the Biden-Harris administration over Biden’s immigration record, accusing the president of throwing the border open.

“Under the Trump administration, if you came in illegally, you were apprehended immediately and you were deported,” Trump crowed, as the audience on the floor waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” banners. “That’s why, to keep our family safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Biden, convalescing from a case of Covid at his beach house in Delaware, didn’t offer counterprograming. And Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee, has conspicuously not talked about immigration since taking over the top of the ticket. That might be because Harris and Biden’s strongest defense would sound ugly to their liberal supporters. Back in 2020, Biden campaigned on a promise to place a moratorium on deportations; he went as far as to apologize for the Obama-Biden’s administration record number of deportations. That means that, campaigning in 2024, it’s tricky for Biden or Harris to state a simple fact: that their administration has kicked out millions more migrants than Trump ever managed to.

Most Americans don’t understand how many people the Biden-Harris administration has removed from the country, and that’s allowed Trump to repeatedly — almost gleefully — claim he’ll deport “millions” of people every year if he takes back the White House, something he says Biden is too feckless to do. It plays into his narrative that Biden is decrepit. If deportations are a gas pedal, Trump has portrayed Biden as a lethargic octogenarian, too impaired to drive over 10 mph. In reality, Biden has that gas pedal pushed almost all the way to the floor. Under Biden, migrants have been removed from the U.S. at a blistering pace, pushing the country’s deportation infrastructure to its limit. And it’s not clear how Trump could top him if he takes back the White House next year.

Biden’s migrant removals started as soon as he took office. In the spring of 2021, deep in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was in a camp in Tijuana, where some migrants were so hopeful the new president would let them in that they flew “BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” flags outside their tents. But most of them who crossed got a slap from reality: They were quickly frog-marched by U.S. Border Patrol back through the deportation doorway, back to the squalid camps in cartel turf. Others got rapidly loaded onto ICE planes and flown back to Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever. As the number of people crossing the border grew during Biden’s first two years in office, these expulsions reached a scorching pace. ICE charter flights bounced around the globe like Taylor Swift’s jet. According to data collected by Tom Cartwright, a researcher with the advocacy group Witness at the Border, there were more ICE flights in the air during the early Biden years than ever before.

Biden’s expulsion regime was made possible by the most radical shift in immigration policy of the last 50 years: Title 42. When Biden took office, he undid dozens of Trump’s immigration policies, but he kept in place Trump’s most consequential ban, the public health statute Title 42. Using the pandemic as pretext, Title 42 gave the president the power to rapidly expel migrants without the normal court process. During just his first two years in office, Biden used it to kick out over 2.8 million migrants. That’s a stunning number. In Trump’s entire time in the White House, his administration removed only 2 million people total.

There’s an important caveat here. Even though millions of migrants got expelled during Biden’s first years in office, the number of deportations actually shrunk. Though they’re both a form of removal, expulsion and deportations are different: Title 42 expulsions were a brand new phenomenon. They could happen rapidly, without a trial, and the subject was almost always arrested near the border. Deportations, on the other hand, only come after an immigration judge officially orders someone removed, and they often involve people arrested in the interior. During Biden’s first two years in office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported under 200,000 people total — less than any single year during the Trump era.

You might think that’s because Biden didn’t want to deport people. His administration may have been comfortable kicking out migrants who just arrived, but deporting immigrants who have been here a long time is, of course, a different story. That hesitation was likely part of the reason deportations shrunk during the early Biden years. But there’s another reason: ICE — along with all the country’s deportation infrastructure — had been surged to the border. To handle the huge number of new arrivals, the administration sent ICE agents to assist Border Patrol, and that took government workers away from arresting people in the interior. Meanwhile, ICE Air flights were filled to the brim with recent border crossers; they literally didn’t have room for other deportees.

As soon as Title 42 ended in May 2023, deportations immediately skyrocketed to historic numbers. According to data analysis from the Migration Policy Institute , a nonpartisan think tank, Biden “removed or returned” 775,000 unauthorized immigrants from May 2023 to May 2024. That’s more than any previous year since 2010. (For comparison, Trump’s record for removals in one year maxed out at under 612,000 — and that was with Title 42 in place.)

Maybe, if he takes office next year, Trump will be able to get a bit more juice out of the deportation system and get his numbers higher. However, there are indications that the country's deportation system is at its redline. With the current manpower and equipment, it just might not be possible to deport that many more people.

“Regardless of who is in charge, there are just some structural limitations in the system,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director of the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy organization that tends to be pro-immigration. Reichlin-Melnick spends more time with the nitty-gritty numbers on immigration enforcement than most, and recently, he made a chart tracking the enforcement actions against immigrants under Obama, Trump, and Biden. The chart is surprising to look at. Across each administration, the number of deportations per month has remained shockingly flat — it varies, but it has never peaked at much higher than 30,000 a month. Reichlin-Melnick thinks that this might represent the system’s maximum output.

Jeh Johnson, who served as secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama from 2013-2017, said people need to understand that ICE’s powers are not unlimited.

“There’s the basic problem of resources,” Johnson says. “Congress has to agree to appropriate the money for the resources — the people, the facilities and the like.”

That’s because deporting any one person costs thousands of dollars, and it’s a legally and logistically dense quagmire. First, there’s the matter of actually locating and arresting people. There’s no master list of where undocumented immigrants live, and ICE has only a tiny fraction of the total undocumented population under supervision. Then, of course, there’s only a finite number of agents. Biden (like Obama before him) has instructed ICE to prioritize removing the “worst of the worst” — drug dealers, terrorists, sex traffickers, etc. — and so many agents, instead of focusing on arresting as many immigrants as possible, instead focus on tracking down and removing specific fugitives. Under Trump, the number of people in ICE custody shot up, largely because his administration pushed ICE to arrest anyone, not just known criminals.

However, even if ICE arrests more people, the Feds run into the second problem: detaining them. Congress has only funded ICE to jail an average population of 34,000 migrants per day, and, even with more funding, ICE doesn’t have the physical jail space to detain much more than that. These detentions can last months, even years, because the legal process of deporting someone is lengthy, and there’s already a court backlog of over 3 million people. There’s also the nasty business of putting children in jail — much of the undocumented population in the U.S. is underage.

Then there’s the third problem. Even after ICE has a deportation order in hand, there’s the matter of actually getting them out of the country. Deportations to Mexico happen via bus, but deportations anywhere else (besides the rare ones to Canada) require a plane, and ICE’s fleet of contractors is limited. One of its largest passenger flight contractors, iAreo, ceased operations in April after an unsuccessful attempt to navigate bankruptcy. And ICE Air, like any other fleet, has to contend with the nationwide pilot shortage.

Finally, fourth, there’s the not-so-simple matter of landing the deportation planes in a foreign country. Some countries — like Venezuela — do not accept deportations of their own nationals from the U.S., and many more countries make it exceedingly difficult. Brazil, for instance, accepts deportation flights, but requires so much forewarning and paperwork that it’s hard to deport people in meaningful numbers. In this area, Biden has had some surprising success: his diplomats have convinced historically recalcitrant countries, like Cuba and China, to accept deportations — in fact, by some estimates, Biden has deported people to more countries than any other president—more than 170 nations.

Trump, of course, hasn’t been shy about his desire to entirely remake the U.S. immigration system. If deportations are a gas pedal, he doesn’t want to just push it down — he wants to supe up the entire car into a fire-spewing, nitrous-breathing beast fit for Mad Max. “As President Trump has said, the millions of illegals Biden has resettled across America should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in an email. On the campaign trail, Trump has talked about mass deportation camps run by the National Guard, and his aides have floated the idea of deportations on military planes (one wonders if China will still accept deportees if they arrive on B-52s). But there have been no details about how the federal government would pay for such a colossal new deportation. During his 2016 campaign push to build a border wall, Trump seemed self-conscious about how much such a project would cost, and assured voters — falsely — that Mexico would pay for it. Now, as “Mass Deportation Now” replaces “Build the Wall” as the new Republican message on immigration, there have been few questions about how Trump would pay for it.

Johnson, the former Obama DHS secretary, says that even if Congress approves massive new funding and ICE goes on a hiring spree, new agents, “can’t be hired on Monday and start Friday.” It takes years of training to get an ICE agent ready for the field. “And anyone who thinks that the National Guard is the answer — the National Guard is not trained to do enforcement and removal operations,” Johnson said. “It’s something that takes training and skill.”

A recent Axios poll found that a slight majority of Americans — including 42 percent of all Democrats — said they would support mass deportations. Johnson believes the majority of Americans want a secure border. “The most powerful nation on earth ought to be able to do more to secure its perimeter,” he said. But he’s dubious that, when the rubber hits the road, Americans would actually support mass deportations.

“Saying ‘mass deportations’ is a bumper sticker, a rallying cry,” he said. “It’s the equivalent in the level of seriousness with ‘Defund the Police.’”