President-elect Trump’s pledge to deport 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally faces several more obstacles, according to a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The first is staffing and funding from Congress, according to John Sandweg, who served in the Obama administration.
“Trump is going to need a lot more ICE agents,” he told NewsNation in an interview. “This will require a lot of funding from Congress.”
Additionally, the administration will need a huge number of “detention beds.” What Sandweg said is much easier said than done.
What matters most, according to former ICE officials, is the state of the existing U.S. immigration system.
“There is a backlog in immigration court. The Supreme Court has said that immigrants are entitled to due process before being deported,” Sandweg said. “This means Trump will have to find a way to bypass the immigration courts.”
“During the campaign, I don’t think there was a clear roadmap for how they were going to overcome these challenges, to be frank,” he added.
Throughout the campaign, Trump often touted his ‘Day 1 agenda’ focused on border and immigration enforcement, saying at almost every rally that ‘On Day 1, we will launch the largest deportation program in American history.’
Asked about the finances of his plan in an interview with NBC News, President Trump insisted, “There is no price tag.”
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