White House’s immigration blitz runs up against ICE bed capacity

White House border czar Tom Homan is warning of an immigration enforcement blitz in sanctuary cities, as the administration launched enforcement operations in Boston and Chicago this week. The planned surge is running up against a limited number of detention beds. 00:12 Top Stories from POLITICO The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard “We’re almost at capacity,” Homan told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. But “we got beds coming online every day.” His comments underscore an ongoing tension in President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda: The mismatch between the White House’s appetite for increased enforcement and the logistical hurdles of rapidly deploying unprecedented resources and deporting people from the U.S., according to administration officials and policy experts. ICE continues to fall short of the White House’s goal of 3,000 daily immigration-related arrests. Trump has talked of surging law enforcement resources in a number of sanctuary cities to clampdown on crime and immigration, including New Orleans and Portland, in addition to Boston and Chicago. Immigration arrests in Washington also increased with Trump’s deployment of the National Guard. “It’s interesting timing because we don’t have the bed space to support all the arrests,” said an administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. As of late August, there were more than 61,000 people in long-term detention. The government has fewer than 65,000 beds, according to the administration official. The number of people in detention since Trump took office has increased by more than 50 percent, as ICE was holding around 39,000 detainees in the final days of the Biden administration. Reports in recent months have documented concerns about conditions inside of facilities, including overcrowding and lengthy stays in temporary holding rooms. The Department of Homeland Security is rushing to spend billions to expand detention capacity across the country and double its bed space by next year. The agency is tapping into $45 billion provided by the GOP’s policy and tax law for detention expansion, and has turned to GOP governors to form federal-state partnerships — part of an effort to build soft-sided tent facilities and use vacant and local prisons to hold detainees. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the agency, “in mere weeks” has “greatly expanded detention space by working with our state partners” — pointing to “Louisiana Lockup” and “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Deportation Depot” in Florida. “The One Big Beautiful Bill provided historic funding to help us carry out this mandate, including $45 billion to support the expansion of detention space to maintain an average daily population of 100,000 illegal aliens and 80,000 new ICE beds,” McLaughlin said in a statement. Detention capacity constraints will be more prevalent in regions where beds are scarce, said John Sandweg, former acting ICE director from 2013 to 2014. In Illinois, which has restricted both private detention facilities and local contracts with ICE, detainees from Chicago will likely be sent to Indiana, Missouri and other states in the region, which requires more resources for transfers. The agency will face a similar challenge in Boston, he said. “The number of beds is dramatically up. I think nationwide, they’re OK,” Sandweg said. “But I think the challenge they’ll face is, how do they get the bodies — if they’re making a bunch of arrests in Chicago, how are they getting them into the system?” It remains to be seen just how expansive Trump’s sanctuary city crackdown will be, and whether it will result in a sustained increase in ICE arrests nationwide. Homan’s warnings that ICE will “flood the zone” come a month after the Justice Department released a list of more than 30 sanctuary jurisdictions, with Attorney General Pam Bondi sending letters to local and state leaders, threatening to pull funding, dispatch law enforcement and criminally charge and prosecute local leaders they say haven’t done enough to assist with federal immigration enforcement. “Shame on Gov. Healey and Mayor Wu,” Homan said Tuesday. “Shame on both of them. They should be calling the White House thanking Trump, thanking ICE for making the community safer.” With the sanctuary city crackdown, it still appears that the administration’s enforcement resources are being deployed on an “operation by operation” basis instead of as a “high-volume” deportation pipeline, said a former Trump administration official who was also granted anonymity to speak about the challenges. Even as DHS works to build out its bed capacity, there are still a number of challenges in the removal process the agency is sorting through. “Do they have enough transportation? Can they move people fast enough? There are all sorts of pieces to this pipeline, and if any one of them gets clogged, it slows everything down,” the official said. “From teeing up your deportable targets to your detention and transportation plan for them, to keep running it all at scale smoothly — that’s a big management and logistics challenge.” These hurdles extend to the Trump administration’s battle in the courts. Since Trump took office, his aides have taken steps to speed the removal of undocumented immigrants — with a number of these efforts limited or blocked by the courts. Just last week, a federal judge halted the Trump administration’s efforts to expand a fast-track deportation process known as expedited removal. “My perception is that the goal of all of this immigration detention is to facilitate mass deportations. It’s not that they want to be holding people for long periods of time. It’s that they’re trying to stage these removals,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst and lawyer at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank. “If they’re not able to use expanded expedited removal, at least not as much as they had, then that poses a significant detention challenge. Are you holding people for the duration of four-year long immigration court proceedings?” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.