A $25 billion plan to use private military contractors for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants was pitched to Donald Trump’s team shortly before his inauguration, POLITICO’s Dasha Burns and Myah Ward reveal this morning. The proposal is laid bare in a leaked 26-page document setting out how mass deportations could potentially be delivered through a network of “processing camps” on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes and a “small army” of private citizens empowered to make arrests.

Again, because the federal government doesn't currently have the resources appropriated to arrest and deport the number of folks that the Administration would like to deport. The "pipeline" doesn't have enough capacity to move many more people through. To increase the number of deportations from internal enforcement, you need vastly more folks to make arrests, vastly more facilities to detain folks while they await hearings, and vastly more immigration judicial resources to process them all. Existing appropriations just aren't sufficient to do that, which is why the Administration has been unable to get to the numbers they want - and why they're trying to draw on military resources and other law enforcement assets to supplement it.

That's why the Senate GOP is pursuing a two-bill reconciliation strategy, rather than the "One Big Beautiful Bill" approach. They're trying to get more money for internal immigration enforcement to the Administration quickly, so that they can get started spinning up the deportation effort. There's going to be a non-trivial lead time before the appropriations lead to more actual deportations, because the bottleneck appears to be the detention/judicial limit. Despite suggestions that there were oodles of easily deportable aliens ready to be shipped out (because they already had removal orders), ICE's detention capabilities were very quickly filled to capacity in the first two weeks of the Administration. Until they can move people out of the end of the process more quickly (the judicial hearings), they don't have the space to put more people into the beginning of the process (arrests) because they don't have any place to hold them. They need beds and judges and lawyers before they can get a faster rate of people through the system.