Trump touts historic deportation plans, but his own record reveals big obstacles

At the Republican National Convention this summer, hundreds of attendees waved signs demanding "Mass Deportation Now!"

When former President Donald Trump took the stage on the final night of the convention, he promised to launch "the largest deportation operation in the history of our country" if reelected.

Trump's deportation pledge has become a familiar theme of his 2024 campaign, repeated often by the former president at his rallies, in the official Republican Party platform and in his recent conversation with billionaire X owner Elon Musk.

But the Trump administration's own track record reveals why that will be difficult, if not impossible, to execute.

Internal emails and documents obtained by NPR through a Freedom of Information Act request offer a window into how immigration authorities scrambled from the first days of the Trump administration to scale up their detention capacity in response to requests from the White House. At the same time, they reveal how bureaucratic hurdles slowed the process, limiting the administration's ability to ramp up immigration enforcement to match the administration's rhetoric.

On Jan. 26, 2017 — just one day after Trump signed a pair of executive orders on immigration — a top detention official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) circulated an email with "Proposed Facility Activations" in the subject line.

That email, which has not been previously reported, identified roughly 12,000 detention beds that were potentially available for ICE and for which negotiations for new or expanded contracts could begin "immediately." The overwhelming majority of beds were in facilities run by private detention companies.

"We must come up with a plan to ensure that activation is not