Congressional Budget Office estimates of deportations will make Trump angry

The CBO’s latest projections expose the gap between Trump’s tough talk on deportations and the far smaller numbers experts expect he can deliver, writes Dr Abul Rizvi.

THE INDEPENDENT Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in September 2025 updated its population projections for the USA from the ones it did in January 2025.

While it now projects the U.S. population growing more slowly and ageing more quickly, President Trump will be most angered by the CBO’s very modest estimates of how many undocumented migrants it expects Trump to be able to remove, as well as very modest numbers of voluntary self-deportations.

The CBO finds:

...that the U.S. population will increase from 350 million people in 2025 to 367 million people in 2055. It will be smaller and grow more slowly over the next 30 years, on average, than the agency previously projected it would. Those changes stem from lower projected net immigration through 2033 and lower fertility rates over the 2025–2055 period than the agency projected in January.

In CBO’s current projections, the population in 2035 is 4.5 million people smaller (or 1.2%) than it was projected to be in the agency’s January projections. That difference grows to 5.4 million people (or 1.5%) in 2055. The population contains fewer people ages 25 to 54 – the age group that is most likely to participate in the labour force – than the agency previously projected. Deaths are projected to exceed births in 2031, two years earlier than previously projected.

The reduction in net migration is primarily driven by cuts to students, other temporary residents and the offshore refugee intake.

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U.S. population growth rate is projected to slow markedly from over 1% in 2023 to around 0.25% in 2025, rising marginally by 2030 to around 0.3% and then steadily declining to zero population growth by 2055.

By contrast, China’s population over the same period is projected to shrink by more than 100 million and age even more rapidly. Some economists view that as giving the U.S. a competitive edge, while the Trump Administration may view that as a handicap.

But it is in immigration enforcement that the CBO estimates are most stunning.

In 2025, the U.S. Budget provided an additional US$100 billion (AU$153 billion) over four years for immigration enforcement. That includes funding for hiring more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents; additional detention space; additional immigration judges to hear cases; and travel and removal operations.

These funds were also for border security measures, including the construction of new barriers and the improvement of existing ones.

In this regard, the CBO:

‘...estimates that inflows of other foreign nationals (ie arrival of undocumented migrants) fell to low levels before the law was enacted.’

In other words, measures taken by the Biden Administration had already set the U.S. on a path of significantly reducing the arrival of undocumented migrants and actions taken by the Trump Administration before the new funds became available had done the rest of the job.

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The CBO estimates that the additional funding provided will increase the number of ICE agents and that the:

‘...additional personnel will result in 5,500 more arrests in 2026 than there would have been otherwise; that number rises to 100,000 in 2029. To arrive at that estimate, CBO multiplied the number of additional agents it expects to be hired by the average number of arrests a given agent made per year over the 2008–2024 period.’

In terms of detention capacity, the CBO estimates:

‘...an additional 100,000 beds becoming available by 2028. Current detention levels are above the capacity allocated for in I.C.E.’s budget; CBO’s estimate of detentions takes into account that some of the additional beds will be allocated to support current facility populations.’

For legal hearings by immigration judges, the CBO estimates:

...that from 2026 to 2029, an additional 210,000 cases will be heard in immigration court, resulting in 120,000 additional orders of removal. Those estimates are based on the agency’s assessment of the number of additional judges who will be hired over the 2026–2029 period, as well as on the number of cases heard annually by each judge from 2017 to 2019 and the outcomes of those cases. CBO expects that judicial capacity will not keep pace with the increase in arrests, even though the number of immigration judges is estimated to increase, slowing removals from the country.

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According to CBO estimates:

120,000 additional orders of removal described above will result in 70,000 people’s removal from the country. CBO estimates that an additional 220,000 people will be removed who would have received orders of removal without the law, but would not have been removed; that effect is a direct result of the increase in detention under the law. In addition to the number of people removed from the country, CBO estimates that 30,000 people (or 10% of all removals) will voluntarily leave the country over the 2026–2030 period.

The 30,000 voluntary self-deportation estimate compares to 1.6 million self-deported already claimed by the Trump Administration. That estimate is heavily contested as the U.S. does not have exit controls, such as in Australia, to be able to make such an estimate. The Murdoch-owned New York Post has published the Trump Administration estimate without any questioning of its veracity.

The overall estimates, including self-deportations, developed by the CBO suggest that in the 2026-2030 period, an additional 330,000 undocumented migrants may be removed/leave with the additional US$100 billion funding. Even if the CBO is out by a factor of 100%, that represents an extraordinary failure of public policy, given Trump’s own estimates that there are between 10 million and 20 million undocumented migrants in the USA.

I wrote on the likely obstacles to Trump’s deportation plans in July 2024.

But perhaps the brutality, scaremongering and feeding of the Trump base is the objective and rather efficient use of public money.

Dr Abul Rizvi is an Independent Australia columnist and a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. You can follow Abul on Twitter @RizviAbul.