The centerpiece of Donald Trump’s second-term domestic agenda is the mass deportation of what he and his campaign say are 20 million or even 25 million immigrants who are in the country illegally.
“The Republican platform,” Trump said during his July speech accepting his party’s nomination for president, “promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” And while the best estimates have the population of immigrants in the country illegally at around 11 million people, plus the approximately 2.3 million migrants who have been released into the country on bond, parole, an order of supervision or conditional release, this doesn’t seem to matter to the former president, who has targeted anyone he deems “illegal.”
For Trump, mass deportation is the solution to most of the nation’s most pressing challenges. Mass deportation, he says, would end a supposed epidemic of crime and disorder. It would save the culture and secure the nation. And his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, says that mass deportation would, somehow, lower prices and alleviate the housing crisis. “We have a lot of Americans that need homes,” Vance said during his debate last week with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. “We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes, and we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here.”
If Trump is a classic American confidence man, then mass deportation is his miracle tonic — a magical tincture that treats all ailments and cures all maladies. And like any traveling salesman, Trump is careful not to mention the side effects of this potent treatment. But not only are there side effects, the potion doesn’t treat the disease and may kill the patient.
The taxpayer cost
It is obvious that mass deportation would be a humanitarian disaster. If past precedent is any indication of future results, the forced migration and detention of millions of people is very likely to kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of those caught in the dragnet of involuntary removal. If put into place, the plan would destroy communities and tear families apart. And given Trump’s hostility to birthright citizenship, there is every reason to think that his deportation regime would fall on American citizens as well, especially those with ties to the immigrants.
A little less obvious is the extent to which mass deportation would plunge the United States into economic darkness. According to a new report from the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, a mass deportation plan designed to expel 13.3 million immigrants over about 10 years would crash the economy, immiserate millions of Americans and siphon nearly $1 trillion from the federal government.
During last week’s debate, Vance said the Trump deportation plan would start with about 1 million alleged criminal offenders. To deport 1 million immigrants per year, the report says, “would incur an annual cost of $88 billion, with the majority of that cost going toward building detention camps.” Even assuming some measure of “self-deportation,” the federal government would have to build “hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities to arrest, detain, process and remove” all targeted immigrants, at an estimated cost of $66 billion per year.
On top of that, the government would need to spend $7 billion per year to conduct the arrests, $12.6 billion per year to carry out legal processing for arrestees and an average of $2.1 billion to remove these immigrants from the country. None of this includes the cost of personnel, which could raise the overall price tag quite a bit. “Even carrying out 1 million at-large arrests per year,” the report says, “would require ICE to hire over 30,000 new law enforcement agents and staff, instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government.” Assuming an average annual inflation rate of 2.5%, this deportation program would cost at least $967.9 billion over 10 years.
For the cost of this program, the report notes, the United States could build more than 40,000 new elementary schools, construct more than 2.9 million new homes, pay full tuition and expenses for more than 8.9 million Americans to attend an in-state public college for four years, fund the Head Start program for most of the next century and buy a brand-new car for about 20.4 million people.
The economic cost
But the cost of mass deportation almost pales in comparison to the direct economic cost of removing millions of people from the economy. Mass deportation, the report contends, would hurt key industries that rely on their labor: “The construction and agriculture industries would lose at least 1 in 8 workers, while in hospitality, about 1 in 14 workers would be deported due to their undocumented status.”
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Additionally, mass deportation would remove “more than 30% of the workers in major construction trades,” nearly “28% of graders and sorters of agriculture products” and “a fourth of all housekeeping cleaners.” Without workers, you can’t produce the goods and services the country needs to thrive. The result would be inflation and higher prices. (And that’s on top of the similar effects Trump’s blanket tariffs on goods entering the United States are very likely to produce.)
The country would lose roughly 1 million immigrant business owners, along with the revenue they produce and the jobs they create. The federal government would lose tens of billions of dollars in federal taxes, including contributions to Social Security and Medicare. States and localities would lose more than $29 billion in tax revenue. Overall, the American Immigration Council concludes, “mass deportation would lead to a loss of 4.2% to 6.8% of annual U.S. GDP, or $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars.” For comparison’s sake, the country’s gross domestic product shrank 4.3% during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. During that time, unemployment peaked at 10%. And high unemployment is associated with a broad range of social ills, including higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, addiction and premature death.
At the low estimate, then, a mass deportation program would produce — for all Americans — a social and economic crisis comparable to the Great Recession. At the high estimate, it would produce an economic and social crisis that dwarfs anything experienced by Americans since the Great Depression.
Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times columnist.