While campaigning for the White House earlier this year, Donald Trump insisted that if elected president he would launch the “largest deportation” in American history. However, there is one major obstacle that could prevent this from happening: a huge backlog in immigration court cases.
According to a new report by TIME, in order for Trump to enact his deportation plan, billions of dollars need to be allocated to hire thousands of new federal workers and pay for new spaces to hold migrants waiting to be deported.
For someone in the U.S. to be deported, the law mandates they have a final order of removal issued by an immigration court. However, those courts have been severely underfunded and understaffed for years which has delayed decisions like those from being made.
Right now, there are over three million cases that need to be assessed by immigration judges, reported TIME. This is the largest number of cases in the history of the American immigration system—and more people continue to be put into deportation proceedings.
When Trump is sworn in as president later this month, he’ll obtain an agency that is currently deporting people at the highest rate in 10 years. Despite the need to move through the massive backlog, the President-elect intends to move forward however he can.
Republicans will control the House as well as the Senate, and Trump administrators will request Congress to add more immigration officers and border agents.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, told CNN last month that the Trump administration wants “to arrest as many people as we can that are in the country illegally.”
Homan also said that Congress needs to approve funding for at least 100,000 detention beds in addition to the ICE agents, to increase deportations. Still, deporting migrants won’t be as fast and easy as Trump previously stated.