The founder and former CEO of the military contractor Blackwater pitched the White House a plan to deport nearly 500,000 undocumented immigrants per month before the 2026 midterm elections.
Erik Prince was part of a group of prominent contractors and former immigration officials who submitted an unsolicited proposal to help make good on President Donald Trump’s signature campaign promise to deport millions of immigrations, Politico reported.
Their 26-page plan calls for using mass deportation hearings, military “processing camps,” a fleet of 100 private planes and a 10,000-strong private police to forcibly remove 12 million immigrants by November 2026.
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It wasn’t clear if Trump had personally seen the report, but it has been circulating among his advisers since before the inauguration, Politico reported. Since then, Trump has purged top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement after they failed to meet his targets.
“To keep pace with the Trump deportations, it would require a 600% increase in activity,” the proposal’s authors wrote. “It is unlikely that the government could swell its internal ranks to keep pace with this demand… in order to process this enormous number of deportations, the government should enlist outside assistance.”
It was submitted by a special entity called 2USV that also included Blackwater’s former chief operating officer Bill Mathew, who told Politico the White House hadn’t responded to the proposal. Prince declined to comment.
A White House spokesman told the outlet that Trump’s administration “remains aligned on and committed to a whole-of-government approach to securing our borders, mass deporting criminal illegal migrants, and enforcing our immigration laws.”
“While White House officials receive numerous unsolicited proposals from various private sector players,” spokesperson Kush Desai said. “It is ultimately up to the agencies responsible for carrying out the President’s agenda to consider and sign contracts to advance their mission.”
2USV estimated its plan would cost $25 billion, though outside experts who reviewed it for Politico said it would actually cost closer to $80 billion.
But even if the funding were available, forcibly removing 12 million people from the U.S. is “operationally impossible,” not to mention a “moral and economic catastrophe,” said Jason P. House, a former ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration.
The plan also calls for violating existing immigration laws and ignoring due process rights, according to Politico.
Its authors want to deputize 10,000 private citizens to arrest undocumented immigrants, create an undocumented immigrant bounty hunter program for local law enforcement officials, establish a public database of hearing dates instead of issuing notices to appear, and hold mass hearings—all of which are susceptible to legal challenges.
“I don’t see how you could do private sector, deputized law enforcement officers,” former acting director of ICE John Sandweg told Politico. “That’s subject to an immediate injunction by a court.”
Already seasoned ICE officers have accidentally nabbed American citizens during their raids, according to reports.
But 2USV is made up of longtime Trump supporters. In 2018, Prince helped raised money to spy on progressive organizations that opposed Trump, and in 2019, he teamed up with Steve Bannon to privately build a wall along the southern U.S. border.
After he lost the 2020 election, Trump pardoned four Blackwater contractors who had been convicted in 2014 of killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding 20 others during a massacre in 2007.
