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Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday urged his congressional Republican colleagues to prioritize sending more money to the Trump administration to help the president with his mass deportation plan.
“Here’s the question for the Republican Party. We talk about doing this, but we don’t have the resources. We haven’t given the Trump team the resources,” Graham said in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
Mass deportation was one of President Donald Trump’s biggest refrains on the campaign trail. In his stump speech, he repeatedly promised to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” often saying he would deport all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S.
Immediately after the election, Trump dismissed concerns about how much this effort would cost, telling NBC News in a November post-election interview, “It’s not a question of a price tag.”
He added then, “It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here, there is no price tag.”
But in recent weeks, Trump’s appointed border czar, Tom Homan, has told conservative media that Congress needs to appropriate more money for the effort for Trump’s campaign promise to be fulfilled.
Homan said “$86 billion is the minimum” in an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in December, adding: “This operation is going to be expensive to begin with, but in the long run, there’s going to be huge tax savings for the American taxpayer.”
In a November Fox News interview, Homan said, “We’ve got to have the resources to do the job.”
It was a point Graham emphasized on Sunday, telling “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, “We need to give Tom Homan the money now to execute the plan that he’s come up with, and without congressional funding, this is going to hit a wall.”
Graham also endorsed the notion of using the reconciliation process to fund Trump’s plan, which allows the Senate to pass certain tax and funding-related bills with a simple majority.
“So we need to do two bills in reconciliation. The first bill should be $100 billion for the border, $200 billion for national security — put those points on the board. Give Tom the tools he needs to execute a mass deportation strategy,” Graham said.
Homan has said he’ll use additional funding to pay for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and more detention beds, but even with those efforts, experts have cast doubt on the administration’s ability to deport over 10 million people, especially in the space of just one presidential term.
Graham on Sunday seemed to agree that it would be logistically hard to deport everyone living in the U.S. illegally.
“I’m not so sure they’re going to deport 11 million people,” he said. But he pointed to certain groups of undocumented immigrants who could be prioritized for removal, including those who have been convicted of other crimes.
“He said they’re going to deport people here that are part of gangs that are criminals,” Graham said, adding that there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of “serious crimes.”
In a later interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Homan echoed Graham’s point about the financial restraints that could prohibit the Trump administration from deporting 11 million people.
“I’m being realistic,” Homan said. “We can do what we can with the money we have. We’re going to try to be efficient, but with the more money we have, the more we can accomplish that.”
Alexandra Marquez is a politics reporter for NBC News.
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