At first glance, the idea of deporting 30 million undocumented immigrants sounds logistically absurd. It seems politically suicidal, morally grotesque, and economically unviable. And that’s precisely the point. For years, the unspoken strategy among progressive immigration advocates and Democratic administrations has been to overwhelm the system. The assumption was simple: if you allow enough people in, undercut enforcement, delay asylum proceedings, and stretch ICE past the breaking point, the machine will collapse under its own weight. Amnesty—if not by law, then by inertia.

But this strategy misread the nature of the American state. It assumed that cost would be the limiting factor. It assumed that there was some point where the budget said “no.” But America doesn’t fear large-scale expenditures—it industrializes them. Just as the military-industrial complex learned to turn every war into a jobs program, the deportation-industrial complex is now preparing to turn mass removal into its own domestic surge.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about procurement. The logic of wartime spending, redirected inward. If there are 30 million people to remove, then every law enforcement agency, detention facility, border town, federal contractor, and software vendor just found itself a 10-year growth plan. The more people there are to deport, the more money gets spent trying. And when there’s money to be spent, there’s power to be built.

It will look familiar. Local police departments will get new funding under “immigration task forces.” Counties will expand jail capacity “for processing purposes.” Private contractors will bid to provide buses, surveillance software, interpretation services, and biometric tracking. ICE will become the new VA. CBP will get its own public relations office, veteran hiring initiatives, and branded recruitment campaigns. Every piece of the federal deportation puzzle will scatter across congressional districts—just like defense spending. Just like fighter jets built in 50 states to guarantee buy-in.

Even the intelligence community will find its place. The Five Eyes alliance won’t stop at terrorists—they’ll offer data-sharing agreements to help root out visa overstays, border jumpers, and cartel networks. Domestic surveillance, long a third rail, will find new life under the banner of “immigration enforcement.”

It’s not that the political class wants to deport 30 million people—it’s that someone told them they could. And more importantly, that there’s money in it. The idea that scale would act as a deterrent was always a gamble. But now it’s starting to look like an accelerant.

The deeper irony is that, in trying to overwhelm the system into mercy, open-borders ideologues may have instead created the greatest federal jobs program since the WPA. Not in green energy or infrastructure, but in the mechanized removal of the very population they sought to protect. And every mayor, governor, and senator who once cried about federal neglect will now see an influx of cash and contracts—just so long as they play their role in the machinery.

What’s coming isn’t just about law and order. It’s about full-spectrum mobilization. The same way the New Deal turned dams, railroads, and murals into work for millions, the deportation-industrial complex will do the same—with detention centers, court dockets, and field agents.

You thought mass deportation was impossible because it was too big? In Washington, that’s a feature, not a bug. When you give the federal government a problem too large to solve cleanly, it builds an industry around failing slowly. And it keeps the checks flowing.