Former President Donald Trump on Friday predicted he’d break records for the number of people deported from the United States if he were elected for a second term. 

Trump has vowed to launch the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. Tom Homan, who led immigration enforcement during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump administration as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, proudly pitched the idea at the Republican National Convention this summer, telling undocumented immigrants to start packing.

“Let me tell you what it’s not going to be first,” he told 60 Minutes of the mass deportation plan. “It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous.”

Plans for mass deportation

There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, about 3% of the population. Nearly 80% of them have lived in the country for a decade or more, according to estimates by the Department of Homeland Security.

Homan, who Trump has said would join his administration if he wins a second term, said a mass deportation operation would be based on targeted arrests. 

“We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find them based on numerous investigative processes,” he said.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has said it would be reasonable to deport a million people a year. And Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year that deportees would be removed from the country in a massive military air operation.

“You grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging ground and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home,” Miller said at the conference. “You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.”

Homan said he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but immigration enforcement operations at worksites would be needed. 

“If I’m in charge of this, my priorities are public safety threats and national security threats first,” he said.

Others would follow for removals, he said. During a targeted enforcement operation, for instance, if an undocumented grandmother was found in a house, an immigration court judge should decide her fate, Homan indicated

“Let the judge decide,” he said. “We’re going to remove people that have a judge’s order deported.”

Shift in policy

Homan’s suggestion that an undocumented grandmother might face arrest would mark a major shift in policy. Under President Biden, ICE is mostly targeting those deemed national security or public safety threats — and people who just crossed the border illegally.

“It’s not OK to enter a country illegally, which is a crime,” Homan said. “That’s what drives illegal immigration, when there’s no consequences.” 

The majority of the four million deportations carried out by the Biden administration have occurred at the southern border, where an unprecedented influx of migrants created scenes of chaos, a humanitarian crisis, and one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ biggest political vulnerabilities.

Cecilia Vega

Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and “60 Minutes” correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023.

 The mass deportation plan former President Donald Trump has pledged to institute if he’s reelected would come with a hefty price tag.

The American Immigration Council estimated that it could cost $88 billion annually to deport one million people a year. The removal of millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion. 

Tom Homan, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, said he doesn’t know if the $88 billion a year cost estimate is accurate, but he says mass deportation is necessary.

“What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?” Homan said.

How deportations work now

60 Minutes recently joined ICE officers in Silver Spring, Maryland, as they located and arrested undocumented immigrants with criminal histories, including assault, robbery, drug and gun convictions. They’d been identified by ICE as threats to public safety.

They stopped a van and arrested the passenger, a 24-year-old Guatemalan with an assault conviction, who had been ordered deported by a judge five years ago. ICE officers said the driver of the van was also in the country illegally and had been deported once before, but he was let go. Matt Elliston, director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, said the driver didn’t have a criminal record.

“He was picking up his employee to go to work,” Elliston said. “It doesn’t make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that when we have other felons to go out and get today.”

Elliston said ICE’s mission is targeted enforcement — using immigration law to improve public safety.

“It’s not to just aimlessly arrest anyone we come across,” he said.

It took a team of more than a dozen officers seven hours to arrest six people, and that doesn’t include the many hours spent searching for them.

Are there resources to support mass deportation?

There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States — about 3% of the population — and Trump has vowed to launch the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. Homan, who Trump has said would join him if he wins a second term, said he’s unaware of any written mass deportation plan.

“ICE is very good at these operations. This is what they do,” Homan said.

But Elliston doesn’t know how, in Maryland, the agency could find the resources for mass deportation. 

“Just the amount of money that that would cost in order to detain everybody, you know, it [would be] at the Department of Defense level of financing,” he said.

Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff during the first two years of the Biden administration, said it costs $150 a night to detain people like those 60 Minutes saw arrested. The average stay as they await deportation is 46 days. One deportation flight can cost $250,000, and that assumes the home country will accept them. Many, like Cuba and Venezuela, rarely do.

Who would handle mass deportation?

ICE currently has around 6,000 law enforcement officers in its deportation branch. It would require a massive increase in manpower to arrest and deport a million people a year, Houser said.

“You’re talking 100,000 official officers, police officers, detention officers, support staff, management staff,” he said.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said staff could come from other government agencies, like the Drug Enforcement Administration, but Houser criticized the idea of taking people from other agencies outside ICE off their set missions. 

Immigration enforcement also requires specialized training and language skills that most military and law enforcement officers don’t have.

“It is not an easy swap,” Elliston said. “What I can tell you in, from the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration law is second to the U.S. tax code in complexity.”

Cecilia Vega

Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and “60 Minutes” correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023.

Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to implement mass deportation if he’s reelected has ignited fears of family separations. 

Monica Camacho Perez and her family have lived and worked in the United States since coming illegally from Mexico more than 20 years ago. Camacho Perez teaches English as a second language to immigrant adults, and she also works in the public high schools. Her family lives in Baltimore. 

“We are a normal family, like anybody else,” she said. “We go to church. We work every day. We pay taxes,” she said.

She’s among the more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children who are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA.

“I’m the only one right now that’s, like, protected, while my parents are not, my brothers are not,” she said. “My brothers have children that are born here. So if they were to get deported, what will happen to their kids?”

Would families be separated if Trump’s reelected?

When asked whether there was a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families, Tom Homan, who led immigration enforcement during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump administration, said, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.” 

Like Camacho Perez’s nieces and nephews, more than four million U.S.-born children live with an undocumented parent.

Asked why children should have to leave the country where they were born and raised, Homan said, “Because their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis.”

During Homan’s time leading ICE – in what became one of the most controversial policies of the Trump administration – at least 5,000 migrant children were forcibly separated from their parents when their parents were arrested at the border and prosecuted for crossing into the U.S. illegally.

Asked about published accounts saying that family separation at the border was his idea, Homan replied: “Not true. I didn’t write the memorandum to separate families. I signed the memo. Why’d I sign the memo? I was hoping to save lives. While you and I are talking right now, a child’s going to die in the border. . . . So we thought, ‘so maybe if we prosecute people, they’ll stop coming.'”

Trump has said Homan would be joining him in the new administration if he wins a second term. Asked if this family separation policy would be re-instituted then, Homan said, “I don’t know of any formal policy where they’re talking about family separations.”

Asked whether it should be on the table, he replied, “It needs to be considered, absolutely.”

How that would happen given a court settlement reached late last year between the federal government and the American Civil Liberties Union is unclear. Under the settlement, the federal government is barred from separating migrant families at the border for the next eight years if the sole purpose is to prosecute the parents for entering the U.S. illegally. 

“I can’t imagine living here without them.”

Back in Baltimore, Camacho Perez said she has given a lot of thought to what she would do if her parents were deported. Even though Baltimore is where she grew up, and she now owns her own home there, she thinks she would go back to Mexico with her parents if they were deported.

“They’re also part of my American dream,” she said. “And I can’t imagine living here without them.”

Cecilia Vega

Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and “60 Minutes” correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023.