President Donald Trump’s border czar is promising more deportations, but warning that federal law enforcement agencies need more funding in order to follow through on the president’s campaign promise of “mass deportations.” In an interview Monday, border czar Tom Homan reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies involved in the arrest and deportation of illegal immigrants need “a minimum of like $86 billion” to continue carrying out deportations.

“We’re out of money,” Homan said bluntly. He explained, “We’ve got about 46,000 [illegal immigrants] in custody now, we ought to be at about 65,000 at this point in time.” One of the issues that ICE has encountered is running out of space or “beds” for detaining and holding illegal immigrants prior to deporting them. “When we run out of beds, it means we stop interior enforcement operations, because when we arrest somebody, [we’ve] gotta have a bed to put them in for removal,” Homan said. He continued, “Congress does — they need to get us the funding we need so this administration can keep the promises they made to the American people. I think the president was given a mandate: illegal immigration was the number one issue in the campaign.”

The border czar and former ICE chief touted the administration’s success so far in securing the nation’s southern border and stemming the flow of illegal immigrants into the country but warned that the executive branch of the federal government needs increased funding from Congress in order to continue deporting the millions of illegal immigrants who have illicitly entered the country over the past several years. “That’s not enough, [we’ve] gotta do more, and we need money to do that,” Homan summarized.

Homan also refuted the claim that the Biden administration managed more deportations per month during 2024 than the Trump administration has managed since January. He explained that the deportation numbers under the Biden administration were a combination of interior removals executed by ICE and expedited removals carried out by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the border, blocking illegal immigrants from entering in the first place. The Trump administration’s deportation numbers appear superficially low, Homan clarified, because CBP is executing almost no removals at the southern border — because there are almost no illegal immigrants attempting entry.

“The border’s locked down, but the deportation numbers are all interior arrests and what the media’s been doing with it — they’re comparing, under Joe Biden, CBP removals plus ICE removals, but that isn’t the same as just ICE removals in the interior,” the border czar explained. He continued, “Matter of fact, the removals under Joe Biden for ICE — interior enforcement — were the lowest, historic lows in that agency. We have tripled those numbers under the Trump administration.” He added, “But again, if we got more money…”

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem also recently addressed the need for funding in order to continue mass deportations. “Congress needs to continue through with funding that this administration has asked for,” Noem stated in an interview last week. She added, “We have just weeks before we are out of the funds to continue the operations that we have.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, emphasized, “Americans just voted overwhelmingly to both secure the border and thoroughly enforce our immigration laws.” She continued, “The Trump administration is moving as quickly as it can, but it needs Congress to accelerate giving ICE a significant resource increase to clean up the mess the Biden administration created and restore the rule of law, Americans’ security, and U.S. sovereignty.”

Homan has frequently pledged to increase deportations and recently told Breitbart News that he wants to increase worksite immigration raids. “I ordered a vast increase in work enforcement. … We’ve got a plan right now [of] 200 worksites a week,” the border czar said. He warned companies who employ illegal immigrants, “Better to get square of the law than us to take action.” He explained that companies hire illegal immigrants so that “they can pay them less, work them harder, and undercut their competition” who abide by the law and hire U.S. citizens or those in the country legally. He added that once illegal workers are deported, employers “can work at now replacing those illegal aliens with somebody with proper status in the country and save themselves from … possible prosecution and penalties.”

The border czar also noted that workplaces are “the number one place we find victims of trafficking.” He added, “The Biden administration stopped it, and that’s why trafficking went sky high — 600% increase in trafficking. … We’re going to put an end to it.” Under the Biden administration, trafficking at and around the southern border increased drastically, with child trafficking in particular tripling between the beginning of 2021 and the end of 2024. Homan estimated that over 300,000 children went missing and have been trafficked during the Biden administration’s reign and has vowed to find and rescue them.

In a week-long operation in the Houston area, ICE arrested nearly 650 illegal immigrants, including 543 “criminal aliens” and seven gang members, according to an ICE press release Monday. The immigration agency reported that 140 of those arrested had been charged with or convicted of violent felonies, including homicide; 34 had been charged with or convicted of sex offenses or sex crimes against children, including sexual assault of minors, possession of child pornography, and rape; 38 had been charged with or convicted of illegal firearms offenses; 52 had been charged with or convicted of narcotics-related crimes, including drug trafficking; 51 had been charged with or convicted of property-related crimes, including theft and burglary; and nearly 100 had been charged with or convicted of drunk driving. ICE was assisted by federal, state, and local law enforcement entities in the week-long raid.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has reconfigured a Biden-era program previously used to facilitate illegal immigration to now serve as a tool for self-deportations. Under the Biden administration, the CBP One app was used by illegal immigrants to schedule immigration appointments at U.S. ports of entry, allowing at least 30,000 illegal immigrants per month to enter the U.S. Trump immediately shut down the program upon returning to the White House in January, but has since relaunched it with his own administration’s twist.

Now renamed “CBP Home,” the app “gives aliens the option to leave now and self deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” according to Noem. The DHS secretary added that if illegal immigrants don’t leave of their own accord, “we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.” She stated, “The Biden Administration exploited the CBP One App to allow more than 1 million aliens to illegally enter the United States. With the launching of the CBP Home App, we are restoring integrity to our immigration system.”

The CBP Home app gives illegal immigrants in the U.S. the option to submit information verifying their intent to depart, as well as an option for viewing their departure requirements and verifying that they have departed once they have left the U.S. The app does not feature any option allowing immigrants to schedule appointments at U.S. ports of entry, but does feature options allowing DHS workers to review departure information, bus drivers to submit passenger manifests for inspections, and commercial importers to schedule inspections for products entering the U.S.

According to a report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), there are at least 18.6 million illegal immigrants are currently living in the U.S. “Since our December 2020 estimate, the illegal alien population in the United States has grown by 4.1 million, or 28.2 percent, reflecting an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration during the Biden administration,” FAIR noted in its report. The group continued, “As of 2025, American population growth comes almost entirely from unsustainably high levels of immigration, both legal and illegal.”

FAIR observed that the number of illegal immigrants currently in the U.S. is likely significantly higher than 18.6 million, since accurately assessing the number of illegal immigrants in the country is “an inexact science.” The organization noted, “The methods used by those claiming to have calculated a definitive figure should be viewed skeptically, as there is no completely reliable source of information on illegal aliens.” This is because “we do not know exactly how many people cross the border illegally and evade immigration authorities, nor can anyone accurately quantify overstays or gotaways. We can only estimate these figures based on annual and monthly census data.”

FAIR added that “too many” estimates “presume that essentially all unlawful migrants are willing to respond to demographic questionnaires and that they provide accurate information to federal officials.” The organization pointed out, “As their presence in the United States is the result of a violation of law, many illegal aliens understandably see no personal benefit in revealing any information about their nativity or true immigration status.”