President Donald Trump’s deputies are on track to deport 400,000 illegal migrants in his first year, says the New York Times.

“By the first week of August, deportations reached nearly 1,500 people per day,” the newspaper wrote on August 21, adding:

At least 180,000 people have been deported by ICE under Mr. Trump so far. At the current higher pace, the agency is on track to deport more than 400,000 people in his first year in office… but still short of the administration’s stated goal of one million deportations a year.

Agency officials have also blocked and deported roughly 150,000 border migrants.

The deportation numbers are expected to rise next year and be hugely augmented as many illegal migrants decide to go home on their own initiative.

Many of the deported migrants have not been convicted of non-migration crimes, the newspaper complained:

Since then, almost all of the increase in arrests has been of people without any prior criminal convictions. Immigration arrests of people with a past violent criminal conviction increased to about 1,900 in June from about 1,100 in December. At the same time, arrests overall tripled to more than 28,000 and arrests of people with no past conviction or charges increased by almost 20 times.

Trump and his deputies say the expanding deportations — and voluntary exits — will help American families earn decent wages, buy homes, and build families.

“In less than 200 days, 1.6 MILLION illegal immigrants have left the United States population,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said on August 14. “This means safer streets, taxpayer savings, pressure off of schools and hospital services and better job opportunities for Americans.”

The migrant exit is pressuring companies to replace them with high-tech labor-saving machinery, helping ordinary Americans to get more work done each day — and to earn more money. “We’re going to need robots… to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” Trump told Breitbart News, adding:

We don’t have enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient… we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically — it’s going to be robotically… It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself… we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.

The deportation numbers are expected to accelerate as the Department of Homeland Security expands its detention space, paperwork processing, transport capability, and the number of foreign “Safe Third Country” nations that are willing to accept migrants. The projects are being funded with roughly $150 billion in multi-year spending approved by Congress.

For example, agency officials have suggested they want to build a deportation fleet to augment their fleet of leased aircraft. The newspaper noted:

ICE now uses about a dozen charter planes every day to conduct deportations and move detainees around the country, almost twice as many as in January, according to data collected by Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate who tracks ICE flights. In May, ICE modified its contract with CSI Aviation, its primary air charter company, to increase the number of flights per week. It has also resumed using a limited number of military planes.

So far, agency officials have flown more than 1,000 deportation flights to many countries in Central America, South America, Asia, and Africa.