While the former president donald trump redoubles his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in US history, with weeks left until the 2024 electionsan analysis carried out by CBS News showed the very high cost that this would entail.
Many immigration researchers, lawyers and economists have pointed out the immense constitutional, humanitarian and economic problems that raises Trump’s repeated xenophobic promise to carry out mass deportations.
But beyond the anticipated harm to immigrant families, communities and local economies, The detention and deportation of some 11 million people is almost impossible to finance, according to CBS News analysis of US budget and immigration court data.
Even if Congress passed the hundreds of billions of dollars in spendingdeport all undocumented immigrants living in the United States it would take much more than four years, according to the analysis.
CBS News analysis of immigration system data concluded that:
- Detain and deport so only a million people It could cost taxpayers about $20 billion.
- Deport 11 million people in four years it would cost more than 20 times what the nation spent each year for the last five years on deporting people living in the United States. Most of that would be new funding that would have to be approved by a majority of both houses of Congress.
- Assuming Trump got the funding and could quickly expand staffing in immigration enforcement and the courts, the backlog of cases would increase, not decrease, in millions of cases based on what has happened in the last two administrations.
- The Trump administration itself, despite promising to deport millions of people in 2016, deported 325,660 people during the fiscal years in which he was in office.
Analysis reveals cost of deportation to taxpayers
According to a CBS News analysis of federal data, over the past five fiscal years, Deporting a person cost an estimated average of $19,599.
That figure is based on Budget allocations for each step of the deportation process: the apprehension of an undocumented immigrant living in the United States, detention, processing in immigration court, and removal out of the country.
Between 2021 and 2023, when migrant crossings at the southern border reached record levels, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployed about one-sixth of its typically deportation workforce to the border to assist Border Patrol and of Customs. Currently, these migrant crossings have decreased.
ICE also diverted resources to Title 42 deportations, an emergency health authority enacted during the pandemic that allowed border patrol to turn away migrants attempting to cross the border.
In those years, fewer people were deported from the interior of the United States than in previous years, which increased the cost of deportation.
But even when Trump was president and the number of border crossings was lower than during the post-pandemic peak, the cost of deporting a person was still $14,614.
Deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States at the time would have cost between $40 billion and $54 billion a year over the next presidential term, for a total of $216 billion. Last year, ICE received only $9 billion.
Even the lower end of that annual estimate, $40 billion, is enough to provide 20 million families with a Child Tax Credit each year, forks more than double the total budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In four years, the sum, between $160,000 and $216,000 million, It is comparable to the cost of building around half a million new homes across the country.
A similar analysis by the American Immigration Council estimated that the total cost of deporting 11 million people would be even higher, $315 billion dollars. The report was released at a time when a majority (54%) of Americans have said they support mass deportation, according to a Scripps News/Ipsos poll conducted in September.
Mass deportations would reduce jobs
Beyond the costs described above, Deporting millions of immigrants could also have a negative impact on the economy and labor market from the United States.
One study found that Obama’s Secure Communities program, which deported nearly half a million undocumented immigrants, not only removed those immigrants from the workforce, but also had a ripple effect on the reduce employment and hourly wages of people born in the United States.
Expanding on their findings, the researchers estimated that for every million unauthorized workers deported, 88,000 native jobs would be lost.
More than 4 million families could be separated
Mass deportation would not only reduce citizens’ jobs, but would affect family members who are citizens. There are approximately 4.1 million mixed-status families living in the U.S., according to data from the Pew Research Center. About 4.4 million children born in the US live with an undocumented parent.
The economic effect of deporting millions of immigrants on these families was recently reanalyzed in a new report from the Center for Migration Studies which shows the devastation that mass deportation would cause to both undocumented residents and their families with U.S. citizens and their communities.
“It can’t be even close to 11 million”
Trump has said that local police will help with mass deportation since “they know their names, they know their serial numbers.” Experts say it’s not that simple.
“One of the assumptions in Trump’s proposal is that those local police and sheriffs are going to cooperate,” said Abigail Andrews, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “We know from the last two decades that one of the main ways that cities and states have expressed disagreement with immigration processes has been whether or not police have cooperated with ICE.”
Security agents could also end racial profiling of citizens and non-citizens alike in an attempt to identify undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
“The economic cost will be extremely high, but the social, emotional and community costs will also be extraordinarily high,” Abigail Andrews said.director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, told CBS News.
Keep reading:
• They warn that Trump promises mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act
• Brennan Center report denounces what is behind the Alien Enemies Act
• Mass deportations: the most important immigration and economic issue of the 2024 campaign