Mass Deportation After The Midterms Part 2: Here Is The Machine

Last week I argued here that mass deportation is not merely an enforcement exercise but a national logistics operation, and that no one is building the machine to run it at real scale. I argued for a temporary civilian logistics layer, run from the White House, commanded by a few dozen people, and sized backward from the departures the mandate actually requires.

The response, from outside critics to friends in the administration, was: fine, but what is the machine? Name it, and name the parts. (RELATED: Mass Deportation … After The Midterms?)

Fair. So, here they are. This is a preview of a chapter from “Matching the Mandate,” a full-length report out this fall.

Let’s call the machine we need to build the National Remigration Service.

THE INSTRUMENT

Federal law, 5 U.S.C. 3161, lets the President charter a temporary organization by executive order, hire its staff in weeks under existing authority, and sunset it when the mission ends. No new agency and no act of Congress. And we just did this. President Trump used that authority on his first day back in office, when he established the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, with a termination date written into the order itself.

An executive order charters the Service under 3161, followed by separate presidential proclamations invoking the emergency authorities it will rely on, each named individually.

The Service reports to the White House through a single coordinator answerable to the President. The Service sits administratively at DHS because Congress put the money there, but a whole-of-government effort of this magnitude only works if it is run from the White House, both practically and as a manifestation of the political will that underlies its success or failure.

Thirty-five to forty retired military logisticians and law enforcement executives make up the Service’s senior command structure. A small national headquarters in Washington holds the functional chiefs for staging, lift, documents, scheduling, and contracting. Ten regional commands mirror FEMA’s existing regions, each led by a regional commander who owns that region’s share of the daily removals number.

Each region is responsible for local staffing, routes, drivers, and local logistics, with exceptional contracting authority and direct employment, including temporary 1099-like capacities.

THE NUMBER

The mandate, even if it applies only to those brought here under Joe Biden, amounts to about 14,000 departures per day over the remaining two years. Ten million people, seven hundred thirty days.

Every component below is sized to at least that number. Anything less is the debate of the past, producing the system we have now.

STAGING

People awaiting a flight need somewhere to wait that is hours, not weeks, from the aircraft. The answer is federal property adjacent to runways, where no mayor’s permission is required, and no city council can vote the mission dead.

There are painful trade-offs to that speed, but New York has already proven the model in the other direction. The city ran tent facilities on Randall’s Island for eighteen months and housed families at Floyd Bennett Field, a federal airfield in Brooklyn, for over a year. Same tents, same land. The only thing that changes the name from humanitarian relief to so-called internment camp is the direction of travel.

To start, we can select sites that have proven effective in our recent history. Under Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), the DOD stood up eight military installations as temporary communities for tens of thousands of Afghans, using federal land, existing military infrastructure, security, medical support, and rapidly expanded housing capacity. Each region can designate its first site from those installations or their equivalents.

From there, the network can expand onto other federal properties with aviation access, including NASA’s Glenn Research Center beside Cleveland Hopkins, Moffett Federal Airfield near San Jose, and the FAA’s technical center co-located with Atlantic City International Airport.

Half of the OAW sites sit in blue states, so expect lawsuits. Fort McCoy did not require Wisconsin’s permission in 2021 because federal installations do not. The real fights will come through environmental review, the Administrative Procedure Act, and state authority outside the federal perimeter. The legal architecture should be built accordingly, with the applicable emergency statutes invoked separately so an injunction against one does not collapse the others.

And I would like to see the President decide he wants Floyd Bennett Field back for this purpose, and I would like to see Mamdani or AOC try to stop him. That is a 2027 fight President Trump would relish. It is federal property; the mayor’s permission is not required, and after a few tearful AOC press conferences, painful polls, and protests, what will remain is a regular flight schedule and federal authority intact.

WHAT THE FACILITIES ARE

People in these facilities are not free to walk out into the interior of the United States. That is custody.

But they are not ICE detention facilities, and they should not be built to or held to that standard. ICE’s detention standards were written for a population held for months while cases run. Applied to a seventy-two-hour staging site at fourteen thousand a day, that framework does not scale, and our opponents are betting on just that.

Measure the standard against what these same illegal aliens survived getting here and the waystations the Biden administration kept them in after arrival. So, the new standard is a screened facility, usually on an American military installation, with medical staff, a bed, three meals, and a flight out within three days. Together, a more humane departure than any leg of the journey many took to get here.

Contractors and nonprofits provide additional support, and we make up for immediate operational immaturity with buckets of money, with the Service deploying the dollars locally and enforcing accountability at the regional commander level. Again, the Biden administration did this with a network of contractors (politely called NGOs when they are left-wing), and they moved bodies quickly across the whole continent.

These will not be happy or pleasant places, but they will be safe, much safer than the makeshift campsites the coyotes built or the river and desert crossings people endured. Doing this well is exceptionally hard, especially for organizations without experience. But the standard is a refugee camp, not a detention facility.

THE ARITHMETIC OF SPEED

The size of the detention system is not fixed. It depends on how long each person sits in it.

At 14,000 departures a day, ten days of dwell requires one hundred forty thousand beds. Three days require about forty-two thousand. Same throughput, one-third the footprint, one-third the cost, one-third the medical emergencies, one-third the risk for everyone involved. Every hour cut from the pipeline shrinks every facility in it.

Transportation is the forcing function. And the number is public. The Service publishes the daily removals count and the average removal time every day, the way a war effort publishes production figures. The country watches the machine work, the ten regions run against their quotas, and any shortfall is visible by breakfast and addressed with capacity the same day.

So how do you get to three days?

A few design choices can help it work. One, vehicles run from the point of arrest directly to the regional staging site or the airfield, not to cramped urban holding rooms that add days of dwell. And two, every staging facility is built to serve most return destinations, even if that means there is latent capacity, and aircraft sometimes sit waiting. We don’t aim for maximum operational efficiency through an intricate web of domestic transfer flights across the interior. Latent capacity will actually aid total removals, resilience, and even, counterintuitively, speed.

The goal is to make the ten regions as operationally autonomous as possible. Each region owns its share of the daily number and, as capacity matures, should be able to stage and launch most removals directly. Domestic transfer flights should be phased down steadily, except where consolidation still makes sense, particularly for land departures to Mexico and sealift to nearby destinations such as Haiti or Cuba. Each regional commander is responsible for building and completing the manifests needed to meet that region’s daily quota.

LIFT

Fourteen thousand departures a day create a much harder transportation problem than the old immigration system was built for. Pew Research Center estimates that Mexicans now make up only about 30 percent of the unauthorized population. At 14,000 departures a day, that is roughly 4,200 people who can be planned primarily as a ground movement to Mexico. The remaining 9,800 principally require air movement, with sealift and other modes reducing the burden where practical.

In the golden escalator speech that started it all, Trump asked when we would ever beat Mexico at the border. The final piece of that victory is not just stopping the northbound flow. It is making the border work in the other direction at the scale the mandate requires. If Mexico plays chicken and closes the crossings to our buses, we close all traffic into the United States for twenty-four hours and see who blinks.

Give ourselves no credit for sealift or other pressure valves, and assume roughly 100 removals per flight. The remaining population generates a planning requirement of nearly 100 international removal flights per day.

That is not a call to make ICE Air ten times larger. ICE continues its current practices and expands where practical. Its record so far is an exceptional 245 removal flights in a month, roughly eight a day, to thirty-eight countries. Most of the additional lift has to come from the rest of the government.

And that whole-of-government role is already directed by the President. On his first day back in the office, he directed the DOD to support DHS with detention space, transportation, including aircraft, and other logistics services. The Service buys every block of commercial charter capacity available and uses federal dollars and guaranteed demand to expand the market itself. Military air and sealift cover additional requirements, and the Civil Reserve Air Fleet supplies another major layer of lift.

Again, the precedent is recent. The Biden administration activated Stage I of CRAF in 2021 for Operation Allies Welcome and called up eighteen commercial aircraft to move evacuees onward from temporary staging locations. We should begin with at least that level of CRAF capacity, sustain it as necessary, and increase it if the daily requirement demands more.

The requirement is not for ICE to find another ninety airplanes. The requirement is for the federal government to conduct roughly 100 removal flights per day. The Service exists to make the government do it.

But planes and buses only move people who are ready to move. Producing 14,000 removable people every day, clearing legal and identity issues, securing travel documents, and forcing receiving countries to accept them is a production system in itself. That is Part Three.

THE AUTHORITIES

The National Emergencies Act is the switch. Each authority can be invoked separately by executive order or proclamation. Additional overlapping national emergencies could expand the statutory grounds available to the President and strengthen the architecture against anti-constitutional rule by injunction.

Title 10, section 272, expressly permits the Secretary of Defense to make DOD equipment and base facilities available to federal civilian law enforcement. That is the statutory path for immediate first-wave staging at military installations, using existing facilities, equipment, and aviation infrastructure.

Where those installations need additional military infrastructure to support forces assigned to the mission, Section 2808 supplies the construction authority. That can include additional troop billeting, command and logistics space, security-support facilities, vehicle and equipment areas, and supporting utilities. Current law caps domestic use during the emergency at $100 million and requires each project to directly support the immediate security, logistics, short-term housing, or ancillary-facility needs of the military personnel being used.

Title 33, section 2293, provides another infrastructure tool. During a qualifying national emergency, the Secretary of the Army may defer nonessential civil works and apply Army civil-works funds, personnel, and equipment to authorized civil works, military construction, and civil-defense projects essential to national defense.

Transportation has its own emergency coordination authority: 49 U.S.C. 114(g) gives TSA, under the DHS Secretary, responsibility during a national emergency for coordinating domestic aviation, rail, surface, and maritime transportation and overseeing the transportation-related responsibilities of federal agencies other than DOD.

The Defense Production Act matters if commercial capacity gets tight. Title I lets the government require qualifying national-defense orders to take priority over other business and permits the allocation of materials, services, and facilities. More importantly, a standing delegation under Executive Order 13603 places that authority over civil transportation with the Secretary of Transportation, implemented through the Transportation Priorities and Allocations System. Where the required national-defense determination and other legal predicates are satisfied, DOT can priority-rate transportation requirements and even allocate scarce civil transportation capacity as it has done in disaster scenarios. The charter flight and motorcoach markets are constraints, not necessarily ceilings.

Public Law 85-804 gives DHS, DOD, Transportation, and other designated agencies engaged in national security functions extraordinary contracting authority when ordinary contracting law is inadequate to facilitate the national defense. The FAR permits tools, including amendments without consideration, to preserve essential performance, correct contract mistakes, and formalize emergency commitments made before normal paperwork caught up.

Title 10, section 8624, expressly permits the Navy, during a presidentially declared national emergency, to transport and subsist persons aboard naval vessels at government expense. The operational capability is well established: Navy and Military Sealift Command vessels have moved large civilian populations in past evacuation operations, though under different legal authorities.

Together, these authorities give the physical machine a legal architecture built for more than one mode, one department, or one point of failure.

THE DECISION

Every component of this exists today, in statute, in precedent, or in the operational record of the United States government, most of it exercised within the last five years by an administration moving millions of people in the opposite direction.

The capability is proven. The President can call upon it and activate the federal government and the people in the most consequential final two years of any modern presidency.

The voters did their part in 2024. The President did his too.

When Washington finally asks how, the answer will not be a slogan.

It will be a parts list, and this begins it.

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.