Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin revealed how much the federal government pays for deportation cases.
Mullin, appearing on Fox News, discussed the cost after host Laura Ingraham brought up a killing spree in Georgia, allegedly by a UK-born suspect who became a naturalized American citizen in 2022. One victim was a DHS employee.
Mullin said it costs an average of $18,225 to prosecute undocumented immigrants and remove them.
“Because of the way the laws are written and the way they can claim asylum, we have to provide the attorney for the individuals, the way that they clog up our judicial system. And then we have to pay to deport the individual,” he said.
Ingraham replied that that amount is “a drop in the bucket, though, compared to that damage that they cause this country.”
“They cost us lives, jobs, opportunities, seats in schools, our healthcare industry, our hospitals, et cetera,” she said, as Mullin agreed.
“We’re not slowing down,” Mullin said. “We’re going after the illegals. We would love for them to leave on their own, and we have programs to help assist you to go back. Because if we have to go through the prosecution process, you’ll never come back to this country legally, ever.”
The Department of Homeland Security claimed that the Trump administration deported more than 675,000 people in the president’s first year back in office, while about 2.2 million people self-deported.
Some deportations have apparently been to countries other than the individual’s country of origin. According to a February report by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the Trump administration spent over $40 million carrying them out—even though most deportees ended up in the proper country anyway.
According to the report, as of January, the administration had paid more then $32 million to five countries to accept about 300 foreign nationals: Rwanda, El Salvador, Eswatini, Palau, and Equatorial Guinea. Around 80 percent of deportees had already returned to their home country, or were in the process of doing so, the report said.
Trump, in an effort to increase deportations, last year floated that punishment for burning the American flag.
An executive order he signed then allows the attorney general and homeland security secretary to revoke visas of non-citizens “wherever there has been an appropriate determination that flag desecration by foreign nationals permits the exercise of those remedies under applicable law.”
Instituting mass deportations was a pillar of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. That effort appeared to have reached a peak this winter, when blowback from the killing of two citizens in Minneapolis led Trump to admit the need to scale back operations. A few months later, he fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and announced Mullin as her replacement.
