The Mass Costs of President Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan
With President Donald Trump back in the White House, his administration has quickly paved the way for the plan of mass deportation he had promised throughout his presidential campaign. Then-candidate Trump made repeated promises to enact the largest deportation program in U.S. history, and, in his inauguration speech, he stated that his administration will “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” While a majority of Americans may have been generally persuaded by the current President on the need for mass deportation, the costs cannot be understated.
On his first day as President, Trump signed an executive order intended to facilitate his promised mass deportation campaign. In the order, he granted ICE agents the authority to carry out enforcement actions in “sensitive” locations like schools, churches and hospitals, allowing migrants to be detained in virtually any location they’re in. The order also removed substantial Biden-era limits on the expedited removal of undocumented migrants. With the Trump Administration’s expansion of expedited removal and invoking of the Aliens Enemies Act, many undocumented immigrants could be and have been deported without any immigration court proceedings to adjudicate their situation. While the order’s language does not clarify whether the U.S. military will be involved in detaining immigrants, which Trump has voiced support for, the order does charge Northern Command with “seal[ing] the borders.” The military has already flown out thousands of deported migrants on its aircraft to a number of Latin American countries.
Direct costs of deportation
To accomplish mass deportations at the scale that President Trump and his supporters desire will be a massive undertaking given the data on the number of documented migrants. According to a report from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, in 2022, there were approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the country. OHSS estimates that at least 8.7 million of them have lived in the country for more than a decade. Through all of President Barack Obama’s 8 years in office, there were only around 3 million undocumented migrants who were forcibly removed from the country, and more than half of those were migrants who very recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump’s ideal deportation plan would entail removing not only more than triple that number of migrants within a shorter timespan but also removing long-time migrants who are integrated into their communities and minimally visible to authorities.
Enacting a mass deportation campaign to deport millions of migrants across the U.S. interior in only four years would cost an immense amount of money. The American Immigration Council estimates the total cost of arresting 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the country at $74 billion, and they estimate that at least 220,000 additional personnel would be needed at immigration enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to carry out such arrests. Furthermore, constructing detention camps and ensuring they have enough staff, food and beds to detain this mass number of migrants would push the costs even higher, adding around $139 billion. For reference, the entire current budget for ICE and CBP is around $8.5 billion dollars and $21 billion dollars, respectively.
Effects on Agriculture and Meatpacking
According to data from the US Department of Agriculture, in the year 2021, 42% of farm workers in the United States were undocumented or not have work authorization. Specifically in California, the state with the largest agricultural output in the country, half of its farmworkers are with undocumented status, and the fear of deportation has already manifested itself. In California’s Central Valley a few days before Trump’s inauguration, many farm workers chose to not show up to harvest for the citrus season out of fear of ICE raids.
The mass deportation of these farmworkers in California could massively hinder the harvest of a number of specialty crops that the state uniquely produces such as almonds, olives and pomegranates. This could translate to lost profits for farms if they struggle to replace their missing labor with either seasonal temporary workers with an H2-A visa or with U.S. citizens. Given that there are not enough U.S. citizens willing to work in agriculture, farms will need to rely on H2-A workers. However, the application process for H2-A visas has hundreds of complex rules, leading farms to lose profits waiting for workers to pick their perishable crops. Lost farm profits may then translate into higher costs for produce at the grocery store.
The meatpacking industry also has a large percentage of undocumented migrants in its workforce, comprising anywhere from 30–50%. The previous Trump administration conducted numerous workplace raids against the industry, resulting in the arrest of more than 1,800 workers from 2017-2020. Perhaps the most notorious of these raids were those on various poultry plants across central Mississippi in August 2019. In what was ICE’s largest single-state operation in its history, the agency arrested 680 undocumented workers on a single day. Only an estimated 230 of these workers are said to have been deported to their country of origin, while many of the remaining workers are still undocumented and are hesitant to go to work under the new administration.
Given that the new administration is likely to rescind the previous administration’s ban on ICE agents conducting mass worksite immigration raids, these raids may return or exceed in number and intensity under the new administration. Like in the case of farms, meatpacking plants that either see their workers get deported or too afraid to show up to work will need to turn to temporary workers to shore up their ranks. However, this may not be an easy task as the new Trump administration, as it did in the previous one, may restrict the issuing of nonimmigrant work visas like H1-A and H1-B. Lost profits in the meat industry may lead to higher prices on meat and meat products in the grocery store.
Effects on healthcare and social programs
One report by a non-partisan tax organization estimates that in the year 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes, with $34 billion going towards funding government programs like Medicare and Social Security. On a state and local level, undocumented immigrants pay at a higher effective state and local tax rate than the wealthiest in society: while undocumented immigrants pay at an average tax rate of 8.9% in their home states, those at the top 1% in income paid at an average rate of 7.2%. Contrary to claims by President Trump that undocumented immigrants present a strain on government services, data suggests that they are significant contributors to the social safety net millions of Americans rely on.
Given the growing population of seniors in the country, the contributions that undocumented immigrants make to Social Security are becoming increasingly vital to its solvency. The loss of their contributions would likely reduce the solvency of Social Security and perhaps push forward the year in which the program’s fund may effectively run out of money to provide for the country’s elderly. The same report estimates that if undocumented migrants were to achieve legal status, their tax contributions are estimated to increase by $40 billion dollars, as they would gain greater access to job and education opportunities and face less difficulties in complying with tax income requirements.
Despite the billions that undocumented migrants contribute to government programs, their immigration status bars them from accessing them, resulting in high uninsurance rates. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that around half of undocumented immigrants are entirely uninsured, presenting an immense barrier to healthcare. Undocumented migrants are more likely than other migrants to report not having a doctor’s visit or skipping or postponing care in the past year. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service found “that unauthorized immigrants had fewer visits and lower annual per person expenditure” than authorized immigrants U.S. citizens.
Taking into account their large tax contributions and low healthcare usage, undocumented immigrants have in part acted as subsidizers for the American healthcare system. One study found that the contributions of undocumented immigrants into federal taxes and insurance premiums exceeded personal expenditures on healthcare by $4,418 per person. By comparison, this figure was $175 per person for documented immigrants and negative $242 per person for the U.S.-born citizens.
Deporting millions of undocumented immigrants would thus create a situation in which U.S. residents and citizens have to either spend more on their healthcare or receive less benefits in retirement. While it may not be a sustainable solution to continue having undocumented immigrants subsidize healthcare, it is nonetheless an aspect that must be accounted for when discussing the economic effects of President Trump’s deportation plan.
Effects of hard-line immigration legislation in states
In 2010, Arizona enacted SB1070, a law that greatly raised the risk of deportation for many undocumented migrants living in the state. The law required police officers to ask about a person’s immigration status during traffic stops and authorized them to make warrantless arrests of individuals if they have “probable cause” to believe they were undocumented. The bill complemented a 2007 bill called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act” (LAWA) which prohibited businesses from knowingly hiring an unauthorized immigrant. While it is unclear exactly how many undocumented migrants left the state due to the law, analysis by the Pew Research Center did find that 40% of Arizona’s undocumented residents left the state between 2007 and 2019, much of it attributable to these bills.
A 2016 study by Moody’ Analytics found that Arizona’s gross domestic product dropped by an average of 2% a year between 2008 and 2015 due to undocumented migrants leaving the state. The study also found that the exodus of migrants caused the state’s unemployment rate to be 2.5% higher between 2008 and 2015. Another study found that the number of construction workers declined 14% more than in California and New Mexico between LAWA’s passage in 2007 and 2011 while the number of agricultural workers dropped by 15.6% in the same period.
A similar economic impact is expected to be had in Florida from a restrictionist immigration bill the state recently passed. Enacted in 2023, SB 1718 mandates employers with over 25 employees to use E-Verify to ensure they are not employing undocumented immigrants and to submit quarterly reports to the state if they employ undocumented immigrants. The Florida Policy Institute estimates that the E-Verify system alone can cost the state’s economy $12.6 billion.
The law has also created major complications for employers across the state in the agriculture and roofing industry. One roofing company in Fort Myers reported losing about 10% of its employees after the bill’s passage while a farm owner reported having to deal with immense costs due to the high price of getting workers on a H1-A visa to work for him. These complications create less revenue for companies and thereby lead to higher grocery and home repair costs that impact Floridians directly.
Given the negative effects that hard-line immigration measures have had on state economics, there is substantial reason to believe that mass deportation nationwide may end up creating greater economic complications than President Trump and his administration anticipates.
Effects on families and children
Deportations of undocumented migrants in the country’s interior will affect millions of mixed-status households, households in which people in the same household hold different immigration statuses from citizenship to resident to unauthorized migrant. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 70% of the 6.3 millions households that include undocumented migrants are considered mixed-status. As it stands, the Trump administration squarely considers undocumented migrants in mixed-status families to be valid targets for deportation. In an interview with CBS, Trump’s appointed “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, stated that “Families can be deported together” in response to a question asking whether family separations can be avoided during the mass deportation.
Given this reality, Trump’s mass deportation plan poses the risk of removing millions of caregivers and providers from families that need them. The American Immigration Council estimates that, as of 2018, 4.4 million U.S.-citizen children under the age of 18 lived with at least one undocumented parent as of 2018. Mass deportations of the parents in mixed-status households could reduce the nationwide median household income by 47% from $41,300 to $22,000 as many of these households fall into poverty, according to analysis from the think tank Center for Migration Studies.
A review of the existing literature on the social and emotional impacts of deportations reveals significantly negative outcomes for children. Through survey responses from undocumented parents, one study found reduced academic performance and higher truancy among children fearing family separation. Adolescents who actually experience parental deportation are at higher risk of dropping out of school in order to compensate for some of the household income that was lost. Researchers have found forced family separation to be associated with various emotional issues including anxiety, depression, excessive fears, worries, and trauma. The long-term impact that family separation may have on these young children’s future earnings can be incredibly consequential if their personal and financial wellbeing prevents them from excelling academically and obtaining jobs that can afford them a decent standard of living.
The Future of the Deportation Plan
As it stands, a mass deportation campaign that would send all or the vast majority undocumented migrants out of the country is an undertaking that even some in the Trump Administration, including Tom Homan, have doubts it can achieve. However, President Trump was elected on the promise of following a hardline immigration policy that views every undocumented immigrant as worthy of immediate deportation, even those who have resided in the country for over a decade with no criminal record. Should Trump’s ideal campaign promise get fulfilled, the nation can expect to see tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants getting deported this year with the costs of their absence most greatly borne by the industries, communities, and mixed-status families that rely on their work.
Image from Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal (PDM 1.0)