As soon as President Trump took office, a noticeable shift occurred at the southern border: illegal crossings decreased sharply. Alongside this drop, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) started deportation efforts, targeting criminal illegal aliens and reclaiming control over immigration enforcement.
We’ve closely reported on these deportation raids here at PJ Media, and it was certainly impressive how many criminal illegals have been arrested and deported. However, despite these encouraging statistics, Trump is eager to see even better results.
According to a report from NBC News, the Trump administration is “considering tapping into Department of Defense funding to hire contractors, a move that would vastly expand the scale and scope of immigrant arrests and deportations in the U.S., according to three sources familiar with the matter.”
This ambitious plan aims to hire contractors to assist in expanding immigrant arrests and deportations.
The defense contracts would allow civilian-run companies to quickly and rapidly expand temporary detention facilities, such as those that house migrants in tents, as well as to staff those facilities and provide transportation between arrest locations and detention areas. Such a move could also increase the number of airplanes available used to deport immigrants and staff for those flights, the sources said.
Border czar Tom Homan has already tapped agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives and others to help support Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in making immigrant arrests. But the pace of arrests and deportations has failed to meet Homan’s expectations, and President Donald Trump’s.
NBC News previously reported that Trump, who promised to deport “millions and millions” in his inaugural address and made mass deportations a key campaign promise, has recently been “angry” with what he sees as a low number of migrants being deported. And the two top officials in ICE’s enforcement division were recently demoted and reassigned, three separate sources familiar told NBC News.
According to NBC News, one factor limiting ICE is its budget. “The agency was already facing a shortfall even before the Trump administration came into office and began its deportation push,” the network reports. “The low numbers are in large part due to space. Congress has only given ICE the funding for roughly 40,000 beds to hold detained immigrants at any one time. It can work with private prison companies that can provide more space, but ICE is still limited by what it can afford to pay those companies to expand detention space until Congress acts, if it does.”
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With funding from the Defense Department, the financial resources allocated for detention would significantly increase. According to three sources familiar with the planning, the Trump administration is considering the use of LOGCAP contracts — short for Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. These contracts enable the Pentagon to swiftly issue agreements that bolster the logistical support for any operation.
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