If at first you don't succeed, try offering $1,000

In 2024, President Trump campaigned on a pledge of "mass deportation." The Trump administration is attempting to deport one million undocumented immigrants in one year, a goal Vice President JD Vance floated last summer.

In pursuit of this goal, the administration has conducted dramatic raids, flouted court orders, and enlisted law enforcement from agencies not usually involved in immigration enforcement.

But they aren't making much progress.

The Trump administration is not releasing comprehensive data. But according to Tom Cartwright, a former JP Morgan executive who comprehensively tracks immigration flights, "deportations are really not up from where they were under Biden."

On Monday, the Trump administration announced a new initiative to entice undocumented immigrants to self-deport. Those who opt into the program would receive $1,000 and free airfare to their home country.

To make sense of this new policy, Popular Information spoke with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Popular Information: Before this latest initiative, what were the primary tactics the Trump administration used to try to increase the number of deportations?

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: The biggest shift that this administration has done internally is to deputize thousands of other federal law enforcement agents to augment the size of the ICE officer corps. There aren't actually that many people whose job it is to go out into the community and make arrests. ICE previously had a component known as fugitive operations, which was assigned to carry out these kinds of at-large arrests in communities around the country, and that was always a smaller division. We're talking, most years, between 30 to 40,000 people a year arrested out in the community by ICE, which is, of course, a lot of people. But in comparison to the size of the undocumented population of 11 to now closer to 15 million people, 30,000 people a year is a drop in the bucket.

ICE has a massive list of names on what's known as the non-detained docket. So the non-detained docket is a list of millions of people that ICE believes are in the country and who may be subject to removal. It is a target-rich environment for the government. They might know of anywhere close to 2 million people that they could potentially arrest, people who are not already in removal proceedings, but they don't have the manpower to arrest 2 million people. So, generally speaking, ICE internally has prioritized people with criminal records. The biggest policy shift has been this effort to get other people involved, because they just don't have that many actual officers to do these kinds of operations.

We've seen the DEA, the FBI, the ATF, the U.S. Postal Service Inspector Police, the IRS, and a handful of other random federal law enforcement agencies have been detailed to do this. According to Reuters, it's thousands of officers.

PI: Has this been effective in increasing the number of deportations?

ARM: Their internal deportation numbers are not running dramatically higher than in previous years. Maybe 15-20% higher. Their arrest totals, however, are higher right now, but we're not immediately seeing those arrest totals make an immediate impact on deportations, just because deportations are much more difficult and complex. Many people have immigration court rights. A full immigration court proceeding, outside of detention, could take six years. Inside detention, it could take six months to two years.

ICE is trying to target, so far, people with the fewest options for staying in the country. So that's mostly people with final orders of removal, people who've already been ordered deported, or people with serious criminal records who have fewer options for remaining in the country. But they're also picking up, with collateral arrests, a ton of people who don't have any criminal record. These are people who haven't been through the system already, who do have immigration court rights. And so we are seeing, I think that's probably why we're not seeing a major increase in deportations, even though the arrest numbers are going up.

They know that they cannot actually get a million deportations a year. Internally, everyone involved operationally knows that's impossible.

PI: Has the Trump administration been attempting to keep more people in detention to speed up the legal process?

ARM: Normally, people with serious criminal records were usually held in detention, and people without serious criminal records were usually released. ICE has a risk assessment tool that they run for every person to determine whether they should be held in detention.

This administration has adopted essentially a no release policy, and are trying to release as few people as possible. We are seeing the administration just stop releasing people by and large. People who have been in the community for years. They're not flight risks. They have jobs. They have families here. They have houses and properties. There's a memo that says anyone who is going to be released from detention must get D.C. headquarters approval.

PI: Is there enough space for all the people being detained?

ARM: Not really. Right now, ICE detention is very full. As of early April, there were about 48,000 people in ICE detention, and that's getting close to max capacity with the resources that they currently have. Congress last year appropriated $3.4 billion for ICE for detention, which it said was enough funding for 41,500 detention beds. So right now, ICE is already holding between 7,500 to 8,500 more people in detention than Congress appropriated their money for, which means they are burning through cash fast. If they had unlimited funding, there might be 25,000 spare detention beds still floating around at various facilities nationwide, in either private hands or in state and local facilities. Anything beyond that would require constructing new facilities.

PI: How many people will the Trump administration be able to deport at its current rate?

ARM: Unfortunately, we don't have a great answer to that, because the government has stopped publishing some of the statistics that were available that would help us. The closest thing we have is data that's produced by a guy named Tom Cartwright, who is the expert on ICE air removal flights. His latest analysis, which was published yesterday, showed that overall removal flights from the United States are down about 4% from the same period in fiscal 2024.

If you look at people arrested by ICE in the interior last year, only 47,732 people were deported. That number is definitely going to go up. The question is, by how much? If you look back at the Trump years, that number peaked at 95,000 in fiscal year 2018, so they didn't even hit over 100,000 people deported from the interior. And the record for that is 238,000 in fiscal year 2009, Obama's first term, and that is when ICE was at the height of its post 9/11 powers. Trump will not be hitting record levels.

PI: What additional resources is the Trump administration seeking to increase deportations?

ARM: The big thing looming on the horizon is the budget reconciliation bill, where the House Judiciary Committee has already passed a bill that provides $45 billion for ICE detention centers over five years. On an annual basis, that would be a 365% increase in ICE's annual detention budget. The bill also contains $14.4 billion for ICE's transportation and removal operations. That would be, on an annual basis, a 500% increase in funding. Additionally, it would allocate $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE officers. So if that funding becomes law, by the end of Trump's first term, ICE could look very different from what it does today. It would be the most well-funded law enforcement agency in U.S. history, and it would have some of the most law enforcement agents of any law enforcement agency. It would have a larger detention budget than the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

PI: What is your impression of the Trump administration's new policy of offering undocumented immigrations a free plane ticket and $1,000 to self-deport?

ARM: On its face, it's a trap, and that's because the way DHS is selling this policy is with a suggestion that people who take advantage of this will be able to come back into the country. And that is just not true for most people. There is no line that people can take to come back into the country. And you had President Trump suggesting anyone who's a good person might be able to come back in. That's not how the U.S. immigration system works. And in fact, if you look at how the U.S. immigration system works, we have a system that heavily penalizes people who have been here without status for leaving. The moment an undocumented immigrant who's been in the country for more than a year steps foot over the U.S. border, a 10-year bar slams down into effect, and they are unable to legally enter the country for another decade.

Beyond that, of course, there is the reality that if Congress ever does pass a path to permanent legal status, it will require people to have been in the country for a specific amount of time. And so if Congress eventually gets its act together and does something, if they leave, they won't be able to benefit from that.

Then you contrast it to their offer here, which is $1,000 and a plane ticket. And that's not a lot of money for someone who has to now start an entirely new life back in their home country. If that is even possible, of course. Many people face persecution in their own countries. Many people don't have passports from their home countries.

PI: Do you think that there will be a significant number of people who will take the offer?

ARM: It's really hard to say, because for some people, this might be an attractive offer. In any given year, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of undocumented immigrants who depart on their own or go back home. Maybe they decide they were only here for a few years to make some money, and they want to go home. And so for those people who were already planning on leaving, this might just be a really nice offer. Hey, free money. Why not?

Then again, you might have a lot of those people say I don't trust the government, and so I'm not going to come forward and put my name on a list if they didn't know I was already in the country. Maybe I can just leave and stay off the radar, rather than self-report and come forward. So I think we will have to wait and see how many people choose to take advantage of this.