President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plan will be a "cost savings" for the American people, former acting ICE Director Tom Homan told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, responding to a warning from the Wall Street Journal that carrying out the largest mass deportation effort in history could bear a hefty price tag.
"[The Biden administration] is paying for free airline tickets around the country, free hotel rooms at $500 bucks a night, free education, free medical care, and that's in perpetuity," he said.
"President Trump's plan over time is going to save the taxpayers money… They're [the Biden administration] paying $500 bucks a night for hotel rooms in New York City. Meanwhile, there's empty ICE beds at $127 a night, so President Trump's plans will save taxpayers money over time."
Homan and other top voices on the immigration issue have been critical of the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years, as illegal migrants have crossed in record numbers and strained resources in communities across the U.S.
Under their tenure, areas like New York City, Boston and Chicago have become hotbeds for migrants. In New York City, for instance, the once-iconic Roosevelt Hotel became synonymous with the second Ellis Island, as it transitioned into a migrant processing hub and housed illegal immigrants to the brim.
Trump made immigration an issue integral to his campaign, reemphasizing his push for a border wall and mass deportation as he urged during his previous campaigns.
The Wall Street Journal, on Friday, wrote about Trump's plan, which could involve an emergency declaration over the border, wall construction, and deportation.
"A critical near-term priority is finding the money to pay for it. An estimate by the American Immigration Council, a liberal immigration group, estimated that an operation to deport the total number of people living in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over more than a decade, or roughly $88 billion a year," the article read.
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"Any deportation effort requires enormous resources to hire more federal agents to identify and arrest immigrants, contract out space to detain them and procure airplanes to fly them to other countries."
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Key Square Capital Management CEO Scott Bessent, who appeared on "Sunday Morning Futures" along with Homan, also insisted the status quo is more costly than Trump's alternative.
"Let's talk about the human cost. We have 100,000 fentanyl deaths a year because of the porous border. We have the increased crime. We have the underlying fear that the American people have. You can't put a price on that," he said.
"But I'll tell you, too, that what we are going to do here… Donald Trump has staged the biggest political comeback in history, and I think that we are on the verge of a golden age in the economy for the next four years, where we can have a growth agenda, where we deregulate, get energy prices down and get interest rates down, and that will drive growth like we have not seen for years."
