Efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to arrest illegal aliens have led to the detention of more than 250,000 people since President Donald Trump took office, averaging nearly 50,000 arrests per month.

"Our arrest numbers as they stand, are about 250,000 and we want those numbers up, we want to turbo charge them,"  Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told this reporter on the "John Solomon Reports" podcast.

With the administration taking over in late January, those figures point to an arrest rate of roughly 50,000 per month, which would put the administration on course to arrest roughly 2.4 million people by the end of his term. But Trump has set an ambitious target of deporting all illegal aliens from the U.S., putting the total at 21 million. 

Thus far, however, deportations have fallen below the necessary rate to reach that goal, though McLaughlin was optimistic that the "Big, Beautiful Bill" would give DHS the resources it needs to ramp up arrests.

"That's part of the reason why that big full bill is so important, because it increases our detention capacity to 100,000 beds. That's double what we have now," she said. "And why that's so important is it's such an operational key that once we arrest these people, they have somewhere to go and be processed before they're eventually deported from the country itself."

"So getting more of that detention capacity is going to allow us to get those arrest numbers up," she added.

A critical portion of DHS strategy, however, has been to encourage self-deportation through the rebranding of the CBP One App to the "CBP Home" app through which illegal aliens may indicate their intent to voluntarily depart and secure federal assistance to do so.

At the end of May, Border Czar Tom Homan indicated that only about 8,500 people had used the app to self-deport. On Monday, however, McLaughlin said the figure was "certainly in the tens of thousands."

The "Big, Beautiful Bill" is expected to double ICE's detention capacity and increase the number of agents by 10,000.