Immigration and Customs Enforcement has space to detain about 41,000 people a day, but Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, wants space to hold over double that amount.
As arrests of immigrants increase, the administration is scrambling to make sure it has the room to house its detainees and keep President Donald Trump’s promise to deport them.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, told NBC News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs 100,000 beds total, more than double what it has currently. Trump alluded to the need for more room when he ordered the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday to prepare 30,000 beds at Guantánamo Bay for who he said would be detainees posing the greatest threat to Americans’ safety.
An immigration detention room is used to hold people until they are deported, and it “is really kind of a backbone of the mass deportation plan,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center.
“That’s why we see [ICE] floating numbers. They talk about doubling the space to hold people in these ICE jails,” Franzblau said.
The Biden administration made an average of 282 immigration arrests per day in September 2024, the most recent ICE data available.
So far, using seven days of data, the Trump administration’s daily average is 791.
Homan said his instructions to officers and agents were “arrest as many as you can.”
The Trump administration launched its mass deportations operation despite ICE’s $230 million budget shortfall. The first bill Trump signed this term, the Laken Riley Act, requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are arrested or face charges or who have been convicted of “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” But it didn’t include new money to detain those additional immigrants, which DHS said in December it would need.
As of January, ICE reported it had at least 106 facilities nationwide. Congress appropriated funding to detain an average of 41,500 people a day, at a cost of about $3.4 billion.
