Donald Trump's border czar sees $86 billion cost to target migrants

By Alicia Caldwell and Julie Fine

 

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to oversee what he has promised to be the country’s largest ever deportation effort says he will need tens of billions of dollars to carry out the mission, but it will ultimately reduce taxpayers’ burden.

 

“That’s a lot of money. It is,” Tom Homan, who Trump named to lead deportation operations as border czar, said Monday night at a Republican women’s club in central Texas. “But right now we are spending billions of dollars in perpetuity.”

 

Homan, a career immigration official who started working for the government as a Border Patrol agent during the Reagan administration, referenced an estimate of $86 billion for the cost for deportation, though the specifics of what that covered weren’t immediately clear. But he said that figure pales in comparison to the ongoing tally of bills to house, feed and move migrants inside the US.

 

 

“Every illegal alien gets a free hotel room, every illegal alien gets three squares a day,” Homan said at the dinner in Franklin, Texas, about 140 miles south of Dallas. “In the long run, I am going to save the taxpayers billions of dollars.”

 

Homan also cited two recent high-profile crimes blamed on undocumented migrants to justify the spending. “And besides $86 billion, what price do you put on Laken Riley?” he said. “What’s the life worth of a young lady that was burned alive on the subway in New York?”

 

Homan’s comments on funding offer a glimpse into one of the most pressing challenges the Trump administration faces: securing the resources needed to execute mass deportations while navigating a razor-thin majority in Congress. Trump and Homan have both pledged to deport millions of foreigners living in the US without permission and immediately put a stop to illegal border crossing along the Mexican border. 

 

The costs for everything from rounding up individuals to housing them to administering court cases and arranging transportation on chartered flights will be steep, and come up against political hurdles amid potential partisan gridlock.

 

The Department of Homeland Security’s proposed budget for this fiscal year is $107.9 billion. The American Immigration Council said in an October report that a long-term program for mass deportations would cost $88 billion a year “for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.” A one-time operation would carry a price of $315 billion, the group estimated.

 

Homan and the new Trump administration also face staunch opposition from state and local officials around the country who have pledged to do whatever they can to protect migrants living in their communities.

 

Homan had a warning for those officials.

 

They “better get the hell out of the way, we’re coming,” Homan said Monday. “The Chicago mayor, he said I am not welcome in Chicago. Well, guess where I am going to be on day one?”

 

Homan said the planned deportation effort and other yet-to-be-disclosed border security plans are necessary after years of lenient enforcement under the Biden administration, which oversaw record numbers of illegal crossings, primarily by asylum seekers from around the world.

 

Under Biden, migrant arrests at the US-Mexico border have fluctuated sharply, falling from a record high in 2023. The Biden administration credits its tougher enforcement under an executive order for a steady decline since mid-year, while Mexico has also increased efforts to prevent migrants from arriving at the US border.

 

“There is a right way and a wrong way to come to this country,” Homan said. “President Trump is going to secure the southern border. We know how to do it.”

 

Meanwhile, Congress took its first steps on Tuesday toward implementing Trump’s broader crackdown, passing a bill that would target undocumented migrants charged with nonviolent crimes for deportation. The measure, named after Laken Riley, passed the House with bipartisan support and is expected to clear the Senate.

 

Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was murdered last year by an migrant who had entered the country illegally. The man convicted of killing Riley, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was previously arrested for shoplifting.