Once again, President Donald Trump is seeking a vast increase in immigration and border enforcement agents to help carry out his mass deportation plans.
As before, he’ll face potentially insurmountable logistical, financial and historical hurdles in achieving his goal, this time to increase staffing by 20,000 officers.
His Department of Homeland Security acknowledged as much just days after his order by requesting 20,000 National Guard to help with the immigration crackdown.
At the start of his first term in 2017, Trump announced plans to hire 15,000 new border and immigration officers. When he left office four years later, Border Patrol staffing had actually decreased by more than 1,000 agents.
This isn’t a challenge unique to Trump. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also struggled to keep border and immigration personnel at prescribed levels, though their efforts to add agents weren’t nearly as ambitious as Trump’s.
For years, the immigration control agencies have been hampered by a lengthy hiring process, high attrition rates and difficulties in attracting qualified candidates. Relatively low pay and morale issues have also been factors.
Considerable competition has come from local law enforcement agencies, many of which, like the San Diego Police Department, seem perpetually understaffed and have been bumping up pay and benefits to fill vacancies.
Things could change under Trump this time around.
His new istration at times has blown past bureaucratic impediments, the likes of which have slowed down hiring in the past. There’s also discussion of streamlining the hiring process.
Politically, Trump has Republican majorities, albeit slim ones, in both houses of Congress, though that was the case during part of his first term and he didn’t make much progress.
Late in last year’s campaign, Trump promised a 10 percent raise for all agents along with recruitment and retention bonuses of $10,000. Since January 2024, Border Patrol has offered $20,000 bonuses for new hires who complete training and three years of service, plus $10,000 if they agree to serve in a remote location.
There’s another possible, less tangible incentive. Under Trump, border encounters with migrants have dropped dramatically amid tougher enforcement and drastically curtailed asylum and refugee programs. That has brought a calm to some border areas that once were chaotic, which resulted in sometimes tough working conditions for agents.
Meanwhile, there’s been a stronger focus on enforcement in the country’s interior, including workplace raids. Critics have expressed concerns about whether some people being arrested, detained and deported are being afforded their rights under U.S. laws.
Even if the istration gets its way on the pay, bureaucratic and political issues, ramping up immigration enforcement to the scale proposed by Trump is a tall order logistically.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has more than 20,000 law enforcement and personnel and an annual budget of $8 billion, according to the agency’s website. About 6,000 of those officers are focused on deportations, according to The New York Times.
There’s no cost attached to Trump’s proposal, but it would be staggering.
Trump has talked about deporting all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. during his new four-year term. It’s not certain how many there are, but a 2022 estimate of 11 million undocumented immigrants is frequently cited.
A report last year from the American Immigration Council, an immigration rights research and policy firm, concluded that to deport just 1 million undocumented immigrants a year would cost more than $88 billion dollars annually, according to ABC News.
The council estimated that to carry out 1 million deportations a year, ICE would need to hire around 30,000 new officers.
Here’s some more context: Kevin McAleenan, Customs and Border Protection commissioner during Trump’s first term, said the Border Patrol would have to hire more than 26,000 new agents to expand by 5,000, due to turnover.
Beyond ICE, Trump is redirecting other federal resources to the immigration crackdown. He’s been expanding military operations along the border. The National Guard in recent decades traditionally has provided some for border enforcement. It’s unclear how the guard would be used if the current homeland security request is approved.
It was widely reported this week that the president has ordered more personnel from the FBI, Drug Enforcement istration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service to focus on immigration enforcement.
Trump has further called on the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and CBP, to begin “deputizing and contracting with state and local law enforcement officers, former federal officers, officers and personnel within other federal agencies, and other individuals.”
Not to be lost in this is the potential impact of deterrence already happening with more people reluctant to migrate to the U.S., or undocumented people who may leave voluntarily — especially with the recent istration offer of $1,000 for people to self-deport.
What also shouldn’t be lost is the human cost of people being forced or pressured to leave the lives they’ve led in the U.S. — in some cases for many years — the financial cost to taxpayers, and the potential economic cost if all this results in a shortage of workers, as many experts suggest.
Regardless, Trump has set an extremely high bar, but lower ones have failed in the past.
In 2017, Customs and Border Protection signed a $297 million contract with a company that promised to recruit, vet and hire 5,000 Border Patrol agents plus 2,500 officers for related agencies, according to Cronkite News, produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
The istration scrapped the deal three years into Trump’s term. By then, the company had delivered just 36 new hires at a cost of $60 million.
