Mass Deportation … After The Midterms?

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been candid about the terms in which he was given his job. Keep enforcement quiet. Keep the headlines manageable. Stay the bigger political fight until after the midterms.

The base knew the plan too, and for months it tolerated “Enforcement Twitter,” the steady barrage of posts touting individual high-profile arrests and removal numbers in the low thousands.

But Mullin’s own missteps over the past month ran that patience out early, which is why the president’s coalition is tearing into him, forcing the White House to intervene more than once.

The anger is earned. The country voted in 2024, and the critics are reading the mandate correctly.

But the fight over Mullin is one piece in driving towards the right strategy, because quiet-for-now is not a plan any more than loud-right-now is, and I say that as one of the loudest. Both are postures, and postures do not get anyone to Port-au-Prince.

The greater failure, as fall approaches, is that no one is building for the President the post-midterm machine to carry out consequential deportations at scale, the scale that everyone means when they talk about mass deportation: millions of people annually. When the political calendar changes, the question will not be whether Washington can find a secretary who actually believes that a new, more ambitious vision for deportations can be implemented. They can. It will not be a matter of whether another wave of visible enforcement can be ordered and politically sustained. It can. The question will be whether the government has built the apparatus required to execute what the voters demanded.

That requires grappling with something real. There is not now, nor was there ever, a serious path to mass deportation through the linear growth of traditional enforcement mechanisms.

That is not merely a point about arrests, although the publicly touted, supposedly aggressive arrest goals were always both dramatically low and the wrong metric. It is also true of the broader suite of financial, legal, and policy tools that we are told will finally produce an outflow of illegal aliens. Each is necessary, none more so than worksite enforcement. Yet none is sufficient to make Haiti or Somalia more palatable when work permits, IDs, and court dates six years out are just one Democratic presidency away from returning.

Stretched through the existing enforcement chassis, each element of traditional enforcement produces linear results against an exponential requirement. Serious, hardworking people at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and elsewhere are working late in the evening to expand each part of that supply chain. But traditional immigration enforcement and mass deportation are not the same skill set. The extension of traditional tools, even after an aggressive expansion by a dedicated staff, can only do so much because those tools were designed for a different problem. Reversing the Biden administration’s fifty-city, plane, bus, and border-caravan mass-importation infrastructure will require a comparable infrastructure heading the other direction.

Washington keeps treating mass deportation as an enforcement exercise when it is at core a national logistics operation beyond the scope of any individual department.

That distinction matters because it changes who owns the problem. As long as mass deportation is understood as immigration enforcement carried out more intensely, it stays a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program with support from a small number of people in the White House, and every conversation collapses into whether DHS is aggressive enough or led well enough.

But a national logistics operation is not a departmental program. It is a mobilization. This country has never run a mobilization out of whichever agency happened to hold the mission. It built new instruments alongside the existing ones and gave them authority to draw on the whole government. That is the missing step, and the prerequisite for achieving deportations in the millions. The United States should, and can at speed, build a civilian-led infrastructure layer that enables and exponentially scales the hard and brave work of our law-enforcement agencies. It should not compete with ICE, Border Patrol, or state and local partners. It should supplement and relieve them.

We know it can be done quickly, because we just watched the Democrats do it. When tens of thousands of illegal aliens arrived in New York City, the city stood up a parallel apparatus in a matter of months: a centralized arrival center, dozens of emergency sites, intake, medical and legal services, casework, transportation, contracting and staffing, with more people housed or in tents than ICE currently has in custody as of this writing. That is a mass population-moving logistics enterprise, built at speed, in the opposite direction. A federal government executing federal law with a mandate behind it should be capable of at least the same ingenuity, and the president is owed that.

It should be run from the center of government, directly out of the White House, whether through the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy’s office or the Domestic Policy Council, through an Interior Enforcement Czar answerable to the president. It ought to be staffed with 35 to 40 retired military logisticians and law enforcement leaders, responsible for flowdown and coordination along regional lines, organized à la FEMA’s operational regions.

To sustain this politically, we need to grapple with three things.

First, the number. The effort must be sized backward from the required number of departures, not forward from the habits and budget lines of the existing system. If the mandate requires removing millions during the remaining life of an administration, then the planning number is not the number the existing system can produce. It is the daily departure requirement the mandate demands. That number is severe.

Matching the mandate over a compressed two-year window, even if only aiming to remove those brought here under Joe Biden, would require something on the order of 14,000 departures a day. That is the scale of the problem. A system celebrating a few thousand enforcement actions a day is not approaching it. It is paying the full political cost of enforcement while the arithmetic escapes.

Second, the machine. The shape of the answer is already clear. A temporary civilian logistics layer, run from the White House but technically seated where the money already sits (DHS) and built backward from departures. Every stage — beds, documents, lift, foreign acceptance, medical screening, family handling, records, staging, transfer points and scheduling — would be sized to that daily removal target, with the entire government available to meet it and temporary staging areas built where aircraft already are, both civilian and military.

It would be empowered to procure under national emergency and national defense contracting authorities to meet the speed the mission demands, rather than the speed a single vendor or legacy procurement channel can manage.

That last piece is worth being concrete about, because it is what makes the rest work. Staging at federal airfields puts people within hours of the aircraft that will carry them and on federal property, removing the local consent fight that has stalled capacity everywhere else it has been attempted. A staging site is what you get when the flight leaves in seventy-two hours because we’ve decided not to let other countries determine when they’ll let us return their own people.

Speed determines whether you are building a detainment center or a temporary staging area, and the same tents on the same federal parkland were used as a humanitarian relief center when New York used them to receive people. Additionally, we know this: the federal government can do this; Joe Biden did. In 2021, it moved roughly 76,000 Afghans through eight military installations, housing, feeding, screening, and processing them, and stood the entire operation up in a matter of weeks. Runways, billeting, medical, and security were already on site. The capability is not hypothetical, just unexercised.

Third, the people. An effort to reestablish law and order at this scale will be seen and felt in every part of the country, and the administration should say so plainly and ask Americans to take part. We can bear this together in a great civic effort, or forfeit federal enforcement of immigration law across the states. There is no longer a third option.

What this looks like is something the president loves to do: put Americans to work. Tens of thousands of Americans as clerks, drivers, medics, schedulers, and builders in a Civilian Conservation Corps-like temporary capacity, even if only for nights and weekends or other pick-up shifts. A machine manned by the country it serves.

That brings this effort even closer to communities, alongside a new blank check for 287(g) partnerships with local officers who know their jurisdictions (no more waiting on payment); and, yes, physical in-office self-deportation infrastructure, so leaving can be an appointment rather than a pursuit.

We have built machines like this before. The Civilian Conservation Corps put a quarter of a million men to work within months of its creation in 1933, and some three million over its life, because the country decided a great civic effort was worth undertaking and organized itself to do so. That capacity did not die with the New Deal.

It is latent in a nation that still moves millions of people and packages a day without blinking. It waits, as it always has, on the decision to use it. A mobilized citizenry contributing nights and weekends to manning weigh-station checkpoints, providing recordkeeping support, transporting supplies, and performing facility operations is not a fantasy. It’s a few college football stadiums’ worth of Americans activated for a two-year civic restoration effort.

Civilians will not perform law enforcement functions. They will build and run the capacity that does not exist today. When someone carries a criminal record, moving them is law enforcement work and should generally stay with officers. But this effort must reach well beyond the existing enforcement pipeline to the resident population as a whole, many of whom can and will leave absent a convoluted legal process.

The American people must be brought along on the journey that they voted for, not as an audience primed to survive grim images and news cycles, but as participants. We have the Cajun Navy. We have wildfire volunteer corps. Americans willing to accept risk for great outcomes. This idea is rooted in our civic character and our history.

Two more years of visible enforcement absent a supporting logistics meta-layer would mean the full political cost paid, the illegal population swollen and increasingly immune to federal law, and a de facto amnesty arriving by default the morning President AOC or President Newsom is sworn in.

The alternative is not more fervor. It is a specific plan. And there is one in development to do this the way it can actually be done at the required speed.

The voters issued the instruction. Congress funded it. The legal authorities exist. Other departments will be tapped to provide consequential logistics support because a true whole-of-government actually uses your whole government.

But even the right post-Mullin DHS secretary will inherit the same arithmetic.

The president did his job. He spoke mass deportation into the political ether. He made it a winning cause in the fall of 2024. He won a night-of, mandate election with it as a central issue. And he got Congress to sign off on a historic check to execute it.

After November, when political management gives way to execution, we will collectively rediscover what is already obvious: elections create mandates, not machinery. The question will not be whether the president wants mass deportation. The question will be whether those serving him can build the capacity to carry it out.

Jason Killmeyer left government in April of 2026 as the Chief of Staff of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and previously served as the Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.