Trump advisers ramp up work on mass deportation push

Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump are drawing up plans to carry out his mass deportation pledge, including discussing how to pay for it and weighing a national emergency declaration that would allow the incoming administration to repurpose military assets to detain and remove migrants.

The behind-the-scenes discussions, which started months before the election and have picked up in the days since Trump’s victory, include policy changes required to increase deportations, according to people working on the presidential transition, members of Congress and others close to the president-elect.

Among the changes: revoking a Biden administration policy directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement not to pursue immigrants in the country illegally who haven’t committed other crimes, and making changes to the immigration court system to speed up cases. Trump’s allies have said they are planning first to focus on immigrants in the country illegally who have received final orders of deportation from an immigration court, of which there are about 1.3 million, as well as those with other criminal convictions or charges.

Trump’s budding deportation plans are still in flux, the president-elect’s advisers said.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the transition, said: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”

Trump has argued that an aggressive deportation effort is necessary to put the country back on course after an estimated eight million migrants entered the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration. It isn’t known precisely how many people are living in the U.S. illegally. The Homeland Security Department estimated the population to be about 11 million in 2022, though the figure has likely grown since then. Trump has said he would target as many as 20 million people.

As a first step, Trump’s advisers are discussing issuing a national emergency declaration at the border on his first day in office, which his team thinks would allow him to move money from the Pentagon to pay for wall construction and to assist with immigrant detention and deportation. But the legality of such a move is unclear. A national emergency, Trump’s advisers think, also would unlock the ability to use military bases for immigrant detention and military planes to help carry out deportations.

Should Trump realize even a fraction of his vision—he has pledged to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history—the 45th and soon-to-be-47th president could send shock waves across the economy and upend the lives of millions of migrants and their families who have called the U.S. home for years.

A critical near-term priority is finding the money to pay for it. An estimate by the American Immigration Council, a liberal immigration group, estimated that an operation to deport the total number of people living in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over more than a decade, or roughly $88 billion a year.

Any deportation effort requires enormous resources to hire more federal agents to identify and arrest immigrants, contract out space to detain them and procure airplanes to fly them to other countries.

Trump has played down the projected cost of his plan. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not—really, we have no choice,” he told NBC News this week, “when people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.”

Officials from Trump’s first administration have also written draft executive orders to resume construction of the border wall and revise President Biden’s existing restrictions on asylum at the southern border to remove the humanitarian exemptions. They are planning to enter aggressive negotiations with Mexico to revive the Remain in Mexico policy, a person working on Trump’s transition said, and are identifying potential safe third countries where asylum seekers could be sent.

They also want to revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants who have either been granted a form of humanitarian protection known as temporary protected status—which covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans—or entered the country on a quasi-legal status called humanitarian parole. That population includes millions who have entered via government appointments at the southern border, as well as tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed into the U.S. following the Russian invasion.

Rep. Chip Roy (R., Texas), an anti-illegal-immigration hard-liner, said he thinks the Trump administration should disregard those deportation protections because, in his view, they were issued illegally.

“I believe we need to push the boundaries and claim they’ve got no status,” he said.

Rather than forcibly deporting all migrants, Trump’s advisers hope they can induce some to leave voluntarily, according to people familiar with the matter. They have discussed offering immigrants in the country illegally—or those who entered on parole through Biden administration programs—a chance to leave the country without penalties, so they can return on a visa if they are eligible. Under normal circumstances, when someone is deported, they are barred from returning on a visa for 10 years.

Republican lawmakers, buoyed by their election gains, are planning to use a process called reconciliation to advance legislation that funds Trump’s immigration proposals alongside his energy and tax priorities. Under the arcane rules of reconciliation, legislation can be approved with a simple majority vote, rather than the 60 votes usually required to advance most bills in the Senate, as long as the changes made are primarily budgetary rather than policy shifts.

Republicans have already taken back control of the Senate, and they are poised to keep control of the House. With majorities in both chambers, they could move the reconciliation measure without support from Democrats.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.) said in a letter circulated to Republican lawmakers this week that reconciliation legislation would “surge resources to the southern border to build the Trump Border Wall, acquire new detection technologies, bolster our Border Patrol, and stop the flow of illegal immigration.”

To avoid adding to the federal deficit, some members of Congress have also floated tacking new fees onto different steps of the immigration process, such as applying for asylum or even appearing in immigration court, that would help pay for deportations. The U.S. immigration system is already largely funded by fees for citizenship and visa applications, though humanitarian programs—and court proceedings—are free.

Trump has alleged the new immigrant population has disrupted American society by committing higher levels of crime, taking jobs and inflating the cost of housing—though available data show immigrants commit crimes at lower levels than U.S. citizens, and analysts have said they often fill low-paying jobs Americans are less likely to take.

Trump struggled during his first term to deport large numbers of migrants, particularly those living in blue states that cut off cooperation with the federal government. In addition to a huge infusion of cash, mass deportations would require unprecedented coordination among federal, state and local officials.

As Inauguration Day nears, Trump’s immigration team is coming into focus. Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, is expected to be appointed to a senior White House role overseeing the southern border and immigration, according to people familiar with the matter.

Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s first-term immigration agenda, is also widely seen by Trump’s allies as returning to the White House in a high-level job. Chad Wolf, Trump’s former acting Homeland Security secretary, and Chad Mizelle, former DHS acting general counsel, are candidates to lead the Homeland Security Department, the people said.

Richard Rubin contributed to this article.

Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com and Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com