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A Donald Trump mass deportation of immigrants would cost hundreds of billions, report says

Andrew Sheeler
Wed, October 2, 2024 

Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants on the scale advocated by former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. JD Vance would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to enact, and would only be possible with the creation of a massive detention camp system.

That’s the finding of a new study by the nonpartisan American Immigration Council.

The report comes as a majority (54%) of Americans have said they support mass deportation, according to a Scripps News/Ipsos poll taken in September.


The immigration council’s study uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey as well as publicly available data about the current costs of immigration enforcement to paint a grim picture of what mass deportation would look like.

Representatives from the Trump campaign did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment by deadline. The Bee also reached out to the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris for comment but received no response.

The total price tag for a one-time operation: $315 billion.

“We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time — incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible,” according to the study.

The report said this operation would be impossible without mass detention camps to detain the 13 million undocumented immigrants.

“To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people,” the report said.

It gets even more expensive if the project is carried out longer term.

The report estimates that a long-term mass deportation campaign of 1 million immigrants a year would average $88 billion a year, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.

“This would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists. The government would also be required to establish and maintain over 1,000 new immigration courtrooms to process people at such a rate,” the report said.

The report also looks at what such a campaign would do to the economy. Here, too, the picture is grim.

“Mass deportations would cause significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector. We estimate that nearly 14% of people employed in the construction industry are undocumented. Removing that labor would disrupt all forms of construction across the nation, from homes to businesses to basic infrastructure. As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs,” the report said.

The American Immigration Council isn’t alone in offering a dire warning about economic impact of mass deportation.

The nonpartisan Brookings Institution cites multiple studies showing that such policies result in the decline not just of foreign-born workers, but also a drop in employment among American-born workers.

A report from the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics found that a mass deportation policy would result in “no economic growth over the second Trump administration from this policy alone.”

At the vice presidential debate Tuesday evening, Vance, a Republican, said that a Trump administration would start its mass deportation project by focusing on undocumented immigrants who have criminal records. He falsely put that number as 1 million people.

According to a fact check from Axios, roughly 430,000 undocumented immigrants not currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody have criminal convictions. That’s far less than the American population at large, where one in three Americans has a criminal record.