Fox News host Maria Bartiromo raised questions Sunday about the practicality – financially and logistically – of deporting millions of illegal immigrants as President-elect Donald Trump promised during the 2024 campaign.
Trump won re-election on Nov. 5, sweeping the swing states and, thus far, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote. He has promised to enact mass deportations of illegal immigrants on his first day in office, which could total millions of people.
Bartiromo raised concerns with her guests, rumored Trump administration appointees Scott Bessent and Tom Homan, on her program Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. She asked how Trump will actually carry out the mass deportations, which she cited as possibly targeting 10 million people.
Border patrol agents take people into custody next to the U.S.-Mexico border fence where the last of the Colorado River flows into Mexico on September 27, 2022 near Yuma, Arizona. The federal government has proposed an unprecedented plan to cut back on water supplies for Arizona, Nevada and California, where millions of people rely on its water and power, as climate change-driven drought continues to lower water levels at the biggest reservoirs in the nation, lakes Mead and Powell, to historic low capacities.
David McNew/Getty Images
Primarily, Bartiromo cited the Wall Street Journal‘s concerns about the cost of deportation, which Bartiromo called “hefty … at a time when President Trump wants no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security. How are we going to afford this?”
Bessent, founder of investment firm Key Square Group, tried to dismiss the cost, saying you “can’t put a price” on the “human cost,” citing fentanyl deaths and other crises that Republicans have linked to the rise of Southern border crossings.
Bessent instead discussed how he believed Trump’s election would herald a “golden age in the economy for the next four years” that will end up making the cost of the deportation “a rounding error.”
“I keep going back to the human cost, and you can’t put a price on that,” Bessent said.
However, The Wall Street Journal has put a cost on that process: Citing the American Immigration Council, the Journal reported the cost $88 billion a year, totaling around $968 billion over the next decade, partially due to the estimated numbers, which range from 10 million to 20 million people.
“Any deportation effort requires enormous resources to hire more federal agents to identify and arrest immigrants, contract out space to detain them and procure airplanes to fly them to other countries,” according to the Journal.
Trump has also previously downplayed the projected cost of the plan, echoing Bessent, saying that “it’s not a question of a price tag” due to the human cost of people who have been “killed and murdered.”
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign by email on Sunday morning for comment.
The American Immigration Council in early October released a study in which it determined that “the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation” aimed at removing “over 13 million people in a short period of time” could hit “an estimated total of at least $315 billion” as its most “conservative” estimate.
This is in addition to resuming the construction of the border wall, which will also feed in additional costs on top of whatever it will take to deport millions of people from the U.S.
Bartiromo also asked Homan, a former acting ICE director and current Fox News contributor, about the cost. Homan insisted that the cost of keeping migrants in the country will balance out the cost of deportations.
The House Budget Committee has cited studies from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that suggest the cost of keeping illegal immigrants at around $150 billion, with “the lion’s share of that cost is borne by state and local governments.”
Bartiromo, however, raised a concern about the practicality of the operation, asking if her guests envisioned “military troops throughout the country rounding people up?”
“Tell me how it’s going to be done in a practical sense,” Bartiromo said.
Homan pushed back on claims that he had said the military would conduct the operation, insisting he “never” said such things and that the operation would be carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
He also explained that the deportations would target criminal threats and national security threats, which would be done “in a humane manner.”
Update, 11/10/24 at 3:20 p.m. ET: Spelling correction.
