Vice President Vance vows Trump admin will 'use everything' it can to increase number of criminal deportations
Vice President JD Vance said he expects deportation numbers to rise as the Trump administration shifts from gaining operational control of the southern border to ramping up efforts to remove illegal migrants from the country.
The White House is working to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to conduct mass deportations of immigrants who entered the country illegally during the past four years of the Biden administration.
"We've cut illegal border crossings by well over 95%, and frankly, I think those numbers are going to continue to come down," Vance told "The Ingraham Angle" Thursday in an interview from the White House.
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"You have immigration detention facilities that were underfunded," he said. "You have ICE, which does most of the actual deportations, that was radically underfunded, really sort of in some ways destroyed by the Biden administration. We're building that capacity up."
Trump signed a number of executive orders relating to immigration when he took office in late January, including declaring an "invasion" at the southern border and deploying U.S. troops.
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Reuters reported last month that the administration deported 37,660 people during Trump’s first month in office, which is below the monthly average of removals in the last full year of Biden's administration.
Vance told Fox News host Laura Ingraham it will take time for deportations to increase, but the administration is making progress and working to ramp up the numbers.
He praised Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem for her public information campaign calling on illegal migrants to self-deport and "border czar" Tom Homan for repurposing the CBP One app to meet Trump’s immigration goals.
"Do you remember that? It actually facilitated illegal entry under the Biden administration," Vance said.
"We're repurposing it to facilitate self-deportation. So what we're going to encourage a lot of people to do is we don't have to come and knock on your door and send you home. We're going to do that, of course. But before that happens, why don't you get on a plane and go home yourself? So it's an all-of-the-above approach. We're going to use everything that we can."
The White House is struggling to increase the number of deportations due to limited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention space.
DHS officials told NBC News they are working with the Marshals Service, Department of Defense and Federal Bureau of Prisons to increase bed space while they ask for more resources from Congress.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told "The Will Cain Show" in late January that some criminal migrants would be moved to Guantánamo Bay, a U.S. Naval base in Cuba, in the interim as the process to repatriate them to their homelands plays out.
Two U.S. defense officials told Fox News that 40 migrants who were held at Guantánamo Bay, commonly known as Gitmo, were sent back to the United States and are now being held in Louisiana.
It’s unclear why they were sent back and whether the United States will continue to hold migrants at that location.
There are currently no migrants being held at Gitmo, and no flights scheduled to arrive with more migrants.
Fox News' Liz Friden contributed to this report.