Politico reported yesterday:

A group of prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, has pitched the Trump White House on a proposal to carry out mass deportations through a network of “processing camps” on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a “small army” of private citizens empowered to make arrests.

The blueprint — laid out in a 26-page document President Donald Trump’s advisers received before the inauguration — carries an estimated price tag of $25 billion and recommends a range of aggressive tactics to rapidly deport 12 million people before the 2026 midterms.

Okay dear readers, let's leave aside for the moment the obvious grenades concealed in this hare-brained, off-the-surface-of-this-fucking-planet Muskian idea. And let’s ignore that it comes from multimillionaire cowboy Erik Prince, brother of the odious and ignorant Betsy DeVos, the last machete-wielding dim bulb Trump put in charge of the Department of Education in his first term. Let's forget for the time being the criminal record of Blackwater in Iraq, where its contractors in 2007 killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 20 in the infamous Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad; four were convicted of murder and of course later pardoned by Donald Trump.

Instead, let’s do the White House a favor: We will assume that Trump decides to go along with the Erik Prince proposal on the theory that he applies to everything he does as president of the United States, which is figure out right up front how much he can skim from every billion-dollar contract he eyeballs coming down the pike for him to sign.

So let's do the cuckoo clock calculations for this crackers-among-the-synapses plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants who, as of this date, haven't even been located yet. Prince says give me $25 billion and I'll round them up and get them all on planes for Guantanamo or someplace anyway before the midterm elections.

The first math we’ll do is calculate the number of days between now and election day on November 3, 2025, so that we can get started figuring out how many people Erik Prince and his camo cowboys would have to round up every day: 616 days to go. That means every single day they would have to locate, arrest, detain, notify of their rights under relevant immigration law, schedule a hearing before an immigration judge, and then carry out the deportation order for 19,480 undocumented immigrants – if, in fact, they can get a judge to issue such an order. That would be 811 potential deportees every hour, which works out to about 14 human beings a minute.

Prince's proposal contemplates hiring 2,000 attorneys and paralegals just to screen the detained undocumented immigrants before they would be referred to another gang of 2,000 attorneys and paralegals that would represent them. Prince proposes a novel solution to the incredible number of deportees they would have to handle every day: mass deportation hearings. How those would be conducted with even a modicum of due process isn’t explained in the $25 billion Prince proposal, because of course it isn't. There wouldn't be any due process, so they would lose the very first challenge to the whole fucking thing that made it before a judge. And then multiply that out, with more judges and more hearings, and you can see about how successful the entire Erik Prince cowboy clusterfuck is likely to be.

But math and the details and the law and the due process and the hearings don't even scratch the surface of what is truly troubling about Prince’s $25 billion boondoggle.

According to Politico, Prince is proposing a kind of DOGE with guns: “Prince suggests deputizing 10,000 private citizens, including military veterans, former law enforcement officials and retired ICE and CBP officers, giving them expedited training and the same federal law enforcement powers of immigration officials.” Got that? He's going to run a want ad for 10,000 yahoos and issue them 10,000 sets of full camo; 10,000 bulletproof vests, each of which can cost upwards of $700 to $800; 10,000 AR-15 full-automatic rifles costing about $1500 each, because Prince’s yahoos aren't gonna put up with namby pamby semi-auto models, don'tcha know; and they'll of course need 10,000 pairs of Oakley S1 Ballistic Shocktube Tactical Sunglasses at $233 a pop, because what self-respecting Blackwater camo-cowboy would settle for anything less?

You already know from what happened with Blackwater in Iraq what's going to happen on the streets of the good old USA. People are going to get shot by trigger-happy Blackwater hired guns. Most of them will be undocumented immigrants, but it's a virtual certainty that ordinary citizens will be caught up the chaos of arresting and detaining nearly 20,000 people per day.

Prince has assured the Trump White House that there's nothing to worry about. He says they've already got 49 airplanes lined up to carry out the deportations. Let's see…at 19,480 per day, that's 397 deportees per flight. Even the latest version of the Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner holds only 300 to 330 passengers, so unless Erik Prince has managed to lay his hands on a bunch of 747’s and A380’s, he's telling a lie to the Trump White House about how many people he can manage to fly out of the country every day, at least until he comes up with the rest of his 100-plane “fleet.”

But hey! The whole fucking thing is one gigantic scam-o-rama to put megabucks in the pockets of Erik Prince and whoever else he decides to spread the wealth around to.

Does the name Donald Trump sound like a likely candidate?

Not to worry. Co-cowboys like Steve Bannon are already on the case, recommending that Trump jump on the Prince plan. “People want this stood up quickly, and understand the government is always very slow to do things,” Bannon informed Politico, excavating a nugget from his deep store of right-wing political wisdom.

See? We're already halfway there. Steve Bannon gets to say military shit like “stood up” as he's dishing out his expert advice to the White House. That's almost as good as strapping on a vest and grabbing a full-auto AR15 and putting on your $233 Ballistic Shocktube Tactical Sunglasses and getting out there in the street and arresting a few undocumented immigrants yourself, isn't it Stevie?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.