Ahead of Schedule and Under Budget: Deporting Millions of Criminal Aliens Won’t Be as Hard as the Left Suggests
Note: This article was inspired by an op-ed column written by David Mastio and published in the Kansas City Star on December 19th. It is, however, my original work, supported by my own research. Any errors or omissions are, of course, my responsibility. This is my third article on deportation published in November and December, 2024 in American Thinker.
President Trump, and his nominee for “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, have made it clear they are dead-serious about deporting millions of violent criminals who are also criminal aliens.
They intend to start with the nearly 1.5 million criminal aliens already served with Orders of Deportation who have either not left America or who have snuck back in across Biden’s remarkably porous border over the past four years. Their initial target, according to Vice President-elect J.D.Vance, will be 1.0 million criminal aliens per year, focusing on those already legally ordered to leave America and not return.
Critics, including those cited by CNN recently, allege that the costs of just one million deportees would be in the neighborhood of $1.0 trillion, a preposterous sum.
It has been made up, apparently, of a combination of hot air and fevered dreams.
These same critics claim that deporting even 1.0 million criminal aliens who already have valid Orders of Deportation would be impossible. President Obama had no trouble deporting that many and more during his term in office, giving lie to that claim as well.
They are trying to use pseudo-logical reasons – four of them – for why targets easily met by previous administrations won’t be met by Trump and Homan.
It is just wishful thinking of the kind that helped America become mired along the length and breadth of our borders with Mexico and Canada, as well as our open sea-frontier borders on the Atlantic, Gulf Coast and Pacific borders.
The following are four myths presented by Mr. Mastio, who supports my view that deportation is do-able, followed by my own analysis as to their flaws.
Deporting Criminal Aliens with Existing Orders of Deportation Would Cost Way Too Much
In several years during the first Obama term, that president’s team managed to deport a quarter-million criminal aliens per year. In 2009 and 2010, Obama budgeted just under $4.0 billion per year in 2024 dollar values for this deportation. Multiplying that number by a factor of four yields 1.0 million criminal aliens and quadrupling the budget for a full million aliens would come to roughly $16.0 billion per year, for 1.0 million criminal aliens per year. This is hardly $1.0 trillion, as some critics claim.
Even if the budget gets out of hand and soars to double those numbers, we’d still be under $32.0 billion per year. And, in roughly 18 months, we will have deported – physically, and not just “legally” – 1.5 million pre-convicted criminal aliens already deported – at a sum not to exceed $48.0 billion. That’s a far cry from the $1.0 trillion Trump and Homan’s critics have trumpeted about in their frenzy to create numbers too high to be considered.
The second myth, that we don’t know who to deport, is even more flawed than the budget-busting estimate offered by the Far Left. Why? Because each of the first 1.5 million or so criminal aliens will have already been through the existing legal process for deportation, followed by a judge of competent jurisprudence giving those aliens a valid Order of Deportation.
These people already have photos, fingerprints, DNA and other incriminating evidence, such as prominent gang tattoos, to help Homan and ICE to find them and send them packing. Having already been convicted, the process is no more difficult than:
A. Identifying the individual
B .Linking the individual with an outstanding Order of Deportation
And that, as they say, is that. Unlike the huge budget deficits that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are pursuing, this isn’t rocket science. ICE and local law enforcement (LEO) agencies will have some significant thousands of these people incarcerated within the United States. As for the rest, they are far from impossible to locate and take into custody.
We’ll Violate the Civil Rights Guaranteed Under the Constitution to Even Already-Deported Criminal Aliens
Perhaps, but violating anyone’s rights is not necessary in order to get them out of our country and back into their home countries.
To accomplish this, I recommend the following:
Hire more – perhaps a lot more – immigration law judges to provide for the swift rendering of justice, along with prosecutors and public defenders who would specialize exclusively in the realm of deportation of criminals who are also criminal aliens. Just as with the FISA courts, lots of new judges will be needed, but as with the item above, this is not rocket science. Law schools have produced – and continue to produce – more attorneys than there are openings in private law firms. Many of these people go on to become prosecutors or public defenders; however, any such attorney working in the field of justice for already-deported criminal aliens would also be competent – in principle – to be judges dedicated exclusively to dealing with deportation issues.
As a country dedicated to abiding by every resident’s – legal or illegal … or deported – right to a speedy trial, we will need the infrastructure that is needed to execute on those existing orders of deportation.
What other civil rights might be damaged has yet to evolve into a consensus of the far Left. But with enough under-employed attorneys adrift in America, the roles of judge, prosecutor and defender will soak up those with excellent training but insufficient luck.
Perhaps the most laughable so-called barrier to success comes from the idea that Countries Won’t Take Back Their Deported Citizens.
This assumes, of course, that these countries have yet to face down soon-to-be President Trump in one-on-one negotiations, discussions which will include words like “tariffs” and “trade embargoes” and sequestering of “remittances” that would otherwise be sent home by the criminal aliens to their kin in their home countries. Once those national leaders realize that President Trump is dead-serious, they will begin negotiating in earnest. The consequences of ignoring our president would be draconian, to say the least.
A major issue involves “remittances,” the funds that are sent home by both legal and illegal aliens. Should the president “suggest” that there would be an embargo placed on such funds transfers unless and until the country in question agreed to accept deportees from America, the source of these illegal criminal aliens will fold like a soggy house of cards. Will this be sufficient leverage? The sum total of these funds was in excess of $800 billion dollars per year in 2022, as estimated by the World Bank. For one country – Tajikistan – 43 percent of their Gross Domestic Product is represented by the funds sent home; while Egypt’s migrant receipts are triple the value of the revenue generated by the Suez Canal, the most heavily-traveled canal on Earth.
World Economic Forum, 2023, per Creative Commons permissions cited
With this kind of financial leverage, there is little that a hard-nosed, America-first negotiator such as Donald Trump cannot achieve.
To sum it all up, if President Obama could deport hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens per year, including conducting the trials leading up to valid Orders of Deportation, imagine what President Trump can do almost two decades later. Further, the Left’s seemingly four logical reasons why “it can’t be done” – when analyzed, using open-source information easily available on the internet – suggests that the costs are manageable, that additional legal infrastructure is possible because so many attorneys are currently under-employed, and because – when Trump gets through with them, national leaders like Trudeau will be eager to do our president’s bidding.
Ned Barnett is a long-time political activist, as well as a “data junkie” who purely loves to find the numbers behind the arguments. In high school and in college, Ned was – alternatively – the top-ranked debater in the state in the spring of 1969, and nationally in the fall of 1969, and it was here that he developed his skills at analyzing situations and focusing on root causes and root solutions. Ned is currently working on a book, planned for publication in late 2025 or early 2026, on what marketing, promotion and sales efforts it takes to win a political campaign. That will be, when published, Barnett’s 43rd published book. He can be contacted at: Nedbarnett51@gmail.com or 702-561-1167.
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