Should former President Donald Trump win back the White House, as many as 4.5 million migrants who entered the US illegally will be a “first priority” for deportation, House Speaker Mike Johnson told The Post in an exclusive interview.
Trump, 78, has already floated the removal of “nearly 20 million” migrants if he becomes the 47th president — and his closest ally in the House sees an opportunity to fast-track the removal of the most dangerous of the lot.
“There’s about 4.5 million who would be the first priority for that, people who’ve already committed crimes,” Johnson (R-La.) said Thursday. “They’re in the system now [for] shoplifting, or whatever it is … or [having] done things that are untoward or unlawful.”
While the figure quoted by Johnson is far higher than any federal records show, Republicans have noted that the Harris-Biden administration is consistently low-balling immigration stats and ignoring nearly 2 million known “gotaways” who evaded arrest when coming into the country.
Many migrants flock to so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions in blue states like New York or California, where officials do not ask about or record their immigration status — and limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested during his Oct. 1 debate with Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz that there are roughly 1 million criminal migrants inside the US.
“We’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. What do we do with them?” Vance responded when asked about future deportation plans. “I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime, in addition to crossing the border illegally.”
Shocking ICE data obtained last month by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) confirms that at least 662,566 migrants have known criminal histories other than illegally crossing the border— but most are not in federal custody.
At least 13,099 illegal immigrants roaming the US have been convicted of homicide and 1,845 have been accused of murder. Another 20,061 are convicted or suspected rapists, and more than 100,000 are convicted or accused of assault.
Just approximately 15,000 other migrants charged with or convicted of crimes are currently being detained by ICE — including 277 convicted murderers and 509 convicted rapists.
“We know where they are, we know what they’ve done, they’re here detained, they gotta go,” Johnson told The Post of the perps.
The House speaker added that he knows the deportations will be “a long” process — but “a strong hand in the White House” pressuring countries of origin to take back the culprits would be “a big step” toward restoring order at the border.
ICE’s current non-detained docket of migrants in the country — those who have been flagged for removal but are not in custody — is expected to hit 8 million by the end of this fiscal year, according to internal agency figures reported by Fox News in June.
That figure stretches back to earlier presidential administrations but has more than doubled under President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Trump deportations could be similar to the dragnet-style sweeps of “Operation Wetback” under former President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, when just over 1 million migrants were removed.
The 45th president has vowed to tap local law enforcement, the National Guard and US military branches to help ICE with the job — but will need a Republican Congress to authorize higher spending levels to accomplish it.
The GOP believes the effort is critical given the shocking lack of vetting that has allowed potential terrorists, gang members, murderers, rapists and ne’er-do-wells to flood into the US.
The lax Harris-Biden border policies have been deemed directly responsible for appalling incidents of known gang-affiliated migrants being briefly detained but later let go — only to murder vulnerable American women like Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student.
Jose Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan national, was listed as a member of the deadly Tren de Aragua gang on internal Department of Homeland Security files — but still waved through the Mexico-Texas border in fewer than 24 hours.
Even former President Bill Clinton admitted while stumping on the campaign trail for Harris last week that if migrants had “all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Since Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, more than 10 million migrants have been apprehended crossing into the US, according to Customs and Border Protection data, 8 million of whom came over the southern border from Mexico.
More than 85% of migrants who crossed the border under the Harris-Biden tenure have later been released into the interior, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted to Border Patrol officials in January.
Biden, 81, also appointed Harris, 60, three months after entering the Oval Office to address the “root causes” of the increasingly chaotic swarm of migrants into the country — making her the administration’s de facto “border czar.”
Johnson also told The Post Thursday that he “begged” the president earlier this year to reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which Biden terminated the month after he took office, to reduce migrant crossings by up to 70%.
The total number of entries was shattering records, but the president wouldn’t budge.
“It’s complicated,” Biden said, in the speaker’s retelling of the exchange. “Mexico doesn’t want that.”
“I said, ‘You can make it less complicated — you just show some leadership,’” Johnson recalled. “‘With all due respect, sir, you’re the president of the United States. It doesn’t matter what Mexico wants. You tell them.’”
“Things have changed,” Biden replied, according to Johnson.
Asked whether he believed Harris when she pledged not to decriminalize border crossings, Johnson responded: “I think she’ll say anything that her team tells her, scripts for her to say in order to win the election. And her record is very well known.”
White House spokesman Angelo Fernandez Hernandez told The Post in a statement Friday that Biden’s executive actions this year had reduced apprehensions between ports of entry “by more than 55%” and blamed Republicans for blowing up a bipartisan-negotiated border package.
Johnson objected to the latter claim, telling The Post that supporters of the bill “couldn’t even get Senate Democrats on board on the thing.”
“It was a mess,” the speaker added. “It would have codified the policies, so many of the policies that created the chaos.”
At least 1.3 million more migrants have also been ushered swiftly into the US from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Mexico by pre-booking flights or using the CBP One App, so long as they arrive at ports of entry — programs that Congress never signed off on and that Republicans consider unlawful abuses of humanitarian parole.
That’s to say nothing of the 1.9 million known “gotaways” who were observed but not caught when entering the US.
Johnson said even that number is likely a gross undercount, considering that he and GOP colleagues on trips to the border have seen migrants pass out of sight as they elude Border Patrol agents — without being tallied.
“We’re going to be dealing with this for the rest of our lives,” the speaker said.
An internal Border Patrol memo earlier this month revealed about 30% of the security cameras that monitor the southern border are “out of commission” due to “several technical problems,” NBC News reported.
A Customs and Border Protection source told The Post that the memo shows the “gotaways” count is likely “way more than reported.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
