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Donald Trump has promised the mass deportation of people who do not have legal permission to be in the United States.

In an interview with NBC News today, the president-elect said his administration would have “no choice” but to carry out those deportations.

“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not – really, we have no choice,” he told the network.

“When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

If a US administration was able to legally move ahead with plans for mass deportations, authorities would still have to contend with enormous logistical challenges.

During the Biden administration, deportation efforts have focused on migrants recently detained at the border. Migrants deported from further inland in the US, from areas not located near the border, are, overwhelmingly, those with criminal histories or deemed national security threats.

Controversial raids on worksites that were carried out during the Trump administration were suspended in 2021.

Deportations of people arrested in the US interior – as opposed to those at the border – have hovered at below 100,000 for a decade, after peaking at over 230,000 during the early years of the Obama administration.

Experts estimate that the total bill for one million or more deportations would run into tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

• You can read more about the logistics of Trump’s proposed mass deportation here.