Efe Özkan
29 January 2025•Update: 29 January 2025
ISTANBUL
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the primary agency responsible for implementing President Donald Trump's promise of mass deportations, has a budget shortfall, and a remedy being considered is reallocating funds from other agencies, according to NBC news.
The Trump administration is looking at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard as possible agencies from which to take money, it said.
Before Trump returned to office Jan. 20 for a second non-consecutive term, ICE was already facing a $230 million budget shortfall as it averaged 282 arrests per day. Senior leaders at ICE have been told the agency must continue to arrest 1,200 to 1,500 people per day, similar to Sunday, when more than 1,200 people were arrested.
A former and a current Department of Homeland Security official told the news outlet that during the Biden administration, the average cost for ICE to deport a single person was about $10,500 -- beginning with the arrest through detention and onto a flight to the person’s home country.
It would mean that a considerable amount of funding would be needed to be reallocated, hampering the TSA, Coast Guard and CISA, or it could be found within other budgets to accommodate for the substantial rise in cost of increasing deportations.
