Mass Deportation

Introduction and Executive Summary

In recent months, leading politicians and policymakers have renewed calls for mass deportations of immigrants from the United States. While similar promises have been made in the past without coming to fruition—during the 2016 presidential campaign, for example, Donald Trump pledged to create a “deportation force” to round up undocumented immigrants —mass deportation now occupies a standing role in the rhetoric of leading immigration hawks. To cite just one example, former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Tom Homan has promised “a historic deportation operation” should a hawkish administration return to power.While some plans have envisioned a one-time, massive operation designed to round up, detain, and deport the undocumented population en masse, others have envisioned starting from a baseline of one million deportations per year.

Given that in the modern immigration enforcement era the United States has never deported more than half a million immigrants per year—and many of those have been migrants apprehended trying to enter the U.S., not just those already living here—any mass deportation proposal raises obvious questions: how, exactly, would the United States possibly carry out the largest law enforcement operation in world history? And at what cost?

Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) along with publicly-available data about the current costs of immigration enforcement, this report aims to provide an estimation of what the fiscal and economic cost to the United States would be should the government deport a population of roughly 11 million people who as of 2022 lacked permanent legal status and faced the possibility of removal. We consider this both in terms of the direct budgetary costs—the expenses associated with arrest, detention, legal processing, and removal—that the federal government would have to pay, and in terms of the impact on the United States economy and tax base should these people be removed from the labor force and consumer market.

In terms of fiscal costs, we also include an estimate of the impact of deporting an additional 2.3 million people who have crossed the U.S. southern border without legal immigration status and were released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from January 2023 through April 2024. We consider these fiscal costs separately because we don’t have more recent ACS data necessary to estimate the total net changes in the undocumented population past 2022, or the larger impact on the economy and tax base of removing those people, an impact that is therefore not reflected in this report.

In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations—an estimated total of is at least $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. For one thing, there would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step. 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. 

In order to estimate the costs of a longer-term mass deportation operation, we calculated the cost of a program aiming to arrest, detain, process, and deport one million people per year—paralleling the more conservative proposals made by mass-deportation proponents. Even assuming that 20 percent of the undocumented population would “self-deport” under a yearslong mass-deportation regime, we estimate the ultimate cost of such a longer operation would average out to $88 billion annually, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade. This is a much higher sum than the one-time estimate, given the long-term costs of establishing and maintaining detention facilities and temporary camps to eventually be able to detain one million people at a time—costs that could not be modeled in a short-term analysis. 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.

Even this estimate is likely quite conservative, as we were unable to estimate the additional hiring costs for the tens of thousands of agents needed to carry out one million arrests per year, the additional capital investments necessary to increase the ICE Air Operations fleet of charter aircraft to carry out one million annual deportations, and a myriad of other ancillary costs necessary to ramp up federal immigration enforcement operations to the scale necessary.

Beyond the direct financial cost of mass deportation, we also estimated the impact on the U.S. economy. Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, we found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It would also result in significant reduction in tax revenues for the U.S. government. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.

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 percent 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.

These numbers do not even come close to capturing the human cost of mass deportation. About 5.1 million U.S. citizen children live with an undocumented family member. Separating family members would lead to tremendous emotional stress and could also cause economic hardship for many of these mixed-status families who might lose their breadwinners, jeopardizing their economic and social well-being.

Mass deportation would almost certainly threaten the well-being of immigrants with lawful status in the United States (and even, potentially, naturalized U.S. citizens) and their communities; they would live under the shadow of weaponized enforcement as the U.S. went after their neighbors, and, as social scientists found under the Trump administration, would be prone to worry they and their children might be next.

The visibility of a massive deportation operation—whether one-time or constant—would likely change the way in which many Americans viewed their government and could threaten the social fabric by increasing vigilantism and hate crimes.

However, it is hard to quantify these costs, and they will not fall equally on all Americans. By contrast, every American taxpayer would shoulder the fiscal burden of mass deportations—exacerbated by the reduced tax base mass deportation would create—and every American would feel the effects of a devastated labor market.

The Targets of Mass Deportation

It has been 38 years since Congress last provided a path to permanent legal status for most undocumented immigrants. A majority of undocumented immigrants have been in the country for at least a decade, building their lives and raising their families in communities across the country.  Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants graduate from schools and attend college every single year, yet are blocked from fully contributing to this country due to their immigration status.

In 2022, we estimate that 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States, comprising 3.3 percent of the total population and 23.8 percent of the immigrant population. Many have some form of temporary but revocable legal status, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. However, most lack any lawful immigration status, and risk the possibility of arrest, removal proceedings, and deportation.

In addition, from January 2023 to April 2024, DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics reports that 2,264,830 migrants crossed the border, were taken into Border Patrol custody, and were then released into the United States on bond, parole, an order of supervision, or conditional release.  Because this entire population is automatically subject to removal proceedings,  throughout the report we estimate the additional budgetary costs necessary to remove them. We acknowledge that this figure is not a complete estimate of the net change in the undocumented population from 2023 onwards, as it does not account for people who have overstayed their visas (a number that cannot be calculated given existing government data), individuals who were not taken into Border Patrol custody and who are currently not known to the United States government at all, or undocumented immigrants who may have left the United States in 2023 and 2024. 

While the largest share of undocumented immigrants still hails from Mexico (43.1 percent), their number has been declining in recent years, in part due to an increasing number of Mexicans returning to Mexico, as well as expanded opportunities for lawful immigration, including for seasonal agricultural workers.  At the same time, the number of undocumented immigrants from almost every other region in the world increased between 2019 and 2022.

About two thirds (66.3 percent) of undocumented immigrants arrived in the country as adults; a quarter (25.1 percent) arrived as children between the ages of five and 17; and 8.6 percent arrived as children younger than five years old. About 58 percent of undocumented immigrants speak English proficiently. As they have settled into their new communities, they have found jobs to earn a living, raised families, bought homes, and actively participated in their local communities.

The effects of mass deportation would likely be most acutely felt in California, Texas, and Florida, states that combined are home to nearly half of the nation’s undocumented population. Undocumented immigrants comprised 6.4 percent of the total population in Texas, 5.5 percent in California, and five percent in Florida.

In 2022, 39 percent of undocumented immigrant households owned their homes. Mass deportation would uproot the lives of at least 1.6 million homeowners.

Many undocumented immigrants share their lives with U.S. citizens. Removing them from the country would pull apart four million mixed-status families. Those families include 8.5 million U.S. citizens who lived with undocumented immigrants, 5.1 million of whom are children. These family members of undocumented immigrants would not only suffer from tremendous emotional stress but also face potential economic hardship due to the loss of major income earners in their families.

Costs to the Federal Government

Modeling and Assumptions

We calculate the cost of removing a population of 13.3 million people, composed of the 11 million who were captured in the 2022 ACS along with the additional 2.3 million arrivals captured in DHS data from January 2023 to April 2024, by calculating the component costs for each of the four steps in the removal process. First, the federal government must identify, locate, and apprehend individuals subject to removal. Second, the government must determine whether to detain the individual during the course of their legal proceeding or release them on bond or conditional parole. Third, the government must place the individual through a legal process to determine if they qualify for relief and, if not, seek and obtain an “order of removal” (or reinstate a previously-obtained order) or an order permitting the individual to depart the country voluntarily. Fourth and finally, the government must carry out the issued order of removal, repatriating the individual to their home country (or a third country).

We acknowledge that it is impossible to fully model the governmental costs of any effort to carry out the largest deportation operation in human history, given the number of variables involved and the scale of operations. The most significant variables for any such operation would be time and capital investment. A single operation aiming to deport 13.3 million people would unfold differently, and with different results and costs, than a longer operation carried out over the course of multiple years. Most saliently, a protracted operation would require sustained investment in detention centers and immigration courtrooms that would have to remain in operation for over a decade. Therefore, throughout this report we provide two estimates: (1) an estimate of the total cost of deporting 13.3 million people at the current costs, not accounting for any capital expenditures, and (2) an estimate of the costs of deporting roughly one million individuals per year until the undocumented population falls to zero, considering the capital expenditures necessary to increase enforcement capacity to that level and to maintain detention and processing infrastructure for over a decade.

We recognize that any such operation, if ever carried out, would likely produce initial economies of scale; initial arrests would likely target individuals already on tICE’s non-detained docket, especially those who have been issued removal orders but have been residing in the U.S. with stays of removal or other administrative forbearance. However, given the unprecedented nature of any such action, it remains unclear how immigrant communities would respond to the initiation of a mass-deportation regime. Would millions pick up and leave, seeking to return to their country of origin to avoid arrests? Or would they go deeper underground, moving locations and changing identities to avoid law enforcement? Without a clear answer to these questions, we are unable to calculate the degree to which costs would change due to economies of scale throughout any such operation. Our estimate of the cost of removing 13.3 million immigrants in a single, one-time operation does not account for individuals “self-deporting,” since it is impossible to know how long such an operation would take and how many people would get the chance to leave before being swept up in an enforcement dragnet.

Our annual-operation model does consider the likelihood that some undocumented immigrants would voluntarily leave the country before being arrested and detained. Millions of undocumented immigrants have U.S. citizen family members, employment, and other deep ties to their communities which would make them less likely to depart at the start of any major enforcement operation. As a result, it is nearly impossible to determine how many would leave and how many would stay. When calculating the costs of removing one million undocumented immigrants per year, we assume that roughly 20 percent of undocumented immigrants will depart prior to arrest, leaving the remaining 80 percent of the population subject to arrest, detention, legal processing, and removal. We find support for this assumption in recent DHS estimates indicating that as of 2022, 79 percent of the undocumented population had been in the United States since before 2009. We presume that individuals who have been in the country for over a decade under constant threat of deportation would be less likely to leave when a large deportation operation is announced.

In general, we do not consider capital expenditures and inflation in the single-operation model. This is because we lack adequate comparators to estimate the costs of ramping up production of detention facilities, courtrooms, personnel, equipment, and other resources needed to conduct such an operation at speed. We have some information allowing us to model these expenditures on the scale needed for an operation that could continue and ramp up over several years, and where such information is available, we incorporate it into our estimates for the annual-operation model.

Our estimate also excludes the legal, managerial, oversight, and other ancillary costs involved with any such operation. As the number of law enforcement agents rises, so too would the managerial and human resources workload of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. Lawsuits challenging allegations of widespread human rights violations would inevitably incur their own costs, and government watchdogs would undoubtedly pay close attention to the largest law enforcement operation in world history.

Throughout the report, we also presume that Congress will not act to change the immigration enforcement process and create a new mechanism for deportation which allows for rapid deportations without any meaningful legal process. While such legislation is not inconceivable, Congress has d generally limited the use of rapid removal processes only to those who have been in the United States for a relatively short period of time, and required court hearings before removal for long-term residents. We also presume that the U.S. government would be able to carry out repatriations for every individual issued a removal order. Currently, this is not possible. Many countries heavily restrict or outright ban U.S. repatriation flights, including Venezuela, Mauritania, China, and India. As a result, removing individuals from those countries is either impossible or cost-prohibitive through commercial flights. Nevertheless, because this report aims to estimate the costs of removing the entire undocumented population, we disregard this reality of international diplomacy to produce these calculations. Finally, we do not consider the ongoing costs associated with removing migrants who might arrive in the United States in the future. Our goal is to focus our estimate on the costs associated with the mass removal of the current undocumented population.

The Costs of Arrests

The first step of the removal process generally involves two events: an arrest, and the issuance of a formal Notice to Appear in removal proceedings (which must be served in person). The majority of ICE arrests occur after individuals are encountered by a local, state, or non-immigration federal law enforcement agency. Before the individual is released from custody by the initial arresting agency, they are taken into custody by federal immigration agents.

The use of these custodial arrests has fluctuated significantly in the last 15 years, following many local jurisdictions adopting “sanctuary” policies which limit local cooperation with ICE, as well as changes in enforcement priorities at the federal level. Because the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are not currently in law enforcement custody, they would not be subject to custodial arrests.

The remaining arrests (a minority) occur “at large” in the community, when Detention and Deportation Officers (DDOs) are dispatched to arrest a known or suspected removable noncitizen at their home, work, or other location. The component which carries out most at-large arrests is ICE’s National Fugitive Operations Program (NFOP), which in 2023 consisted of 129 Fugitive Operations teams and 10 Mobile Criminal Apprehension teams. Other ICE divisions occasionally conduct at-large arrests as well: ICE’s Criminal Apprehension Program conducts them at times, and ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has been responsible for several large raids on employers during which dozens of people are arrested at a worksite. During at-large arrest operations, DDOs may choose to arrest only the target, or use the opportunity to interrogate other individuals nearby and arrest any who are potentially removable (a practice known as “collateral” arrests).

To model the costs of apprehending undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. at large as part of a mass deportation operation, we use the average cost of an arrest carried out under the National Fugitive Operations Program. In determining average cost per arrest, we relied on ICE budget and arrest statistics from Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 through 2020. We chose this timeframe to avoid data anomalies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and 2022, as well as the more recent implementation of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ enforcement priorities that have led to lower arrest totals and thus would artificially inflate the average cost of an arrest. Using this data, we conclude that the average cost per at-large arrest would be $6,653.65.

In addition to the cost per arrest, we consider the costs to transport one million people per year to ICE detention centers after an arrest. We conclude that the minimum cost of transportation from the site of an arrest to the nearest ICE office would be roughly $3,745 per busload of 45 people, using figures provided by the Office of Inspector General in a September 2023 report examining transportation costs of bus travel from Border Patrol stations to ICE detention centers. This would add an additional $83.22 per arrest, producing a total average cost per fugitive arrest of $6,736.87.

We note that this figure is likely significantly lower than the actual cost of transportation, as the contracts reviewed by the OIG were for transporting people from remote areas along the US border. Transportation contracts for arrests inside major metropolitan areas would almost certainly come at higher costs. In addition, costs for transporting vulnerable populations, including hundreds of thousands of children and families, would likely be higher. Therefore, this should be taken as a conservative estimate, with the real cost of transportation substantially higher

Removing 13.3 Million People in a Single Operation

Under our model, the total cost of arresting 11 million undocumented immigrants in a single mass deportation operation comes to an estimated $74 billion. If we include the costs of arresting the 2.3 million new arrivals from 2023 through April 2024, we expect an additional $15.3 billion in costs. Therefore, we estimate the total arrest costs for a single mass deportation operation at $89.3 billion.

This one-time estimate does not consider any additional costs required to hire the potentially hundreds of thousands of additional law enforcement officers necessary to carry out this operation. From FY 2016 to 2020, there were 32.27 arrests per employee working for the Fugitive Operations Program, compared to 59.3 arrests per employee working for the Criminal Apprehension Program. That suggests that a mass deportation operation to round up 13.3 million people could require anywhere from 220,000 to 409,000 additional personnel, a staggering number of people which would require an enormous and near-impossible to estimate initial capital investment to recruit, hire, and train.

As a result, our estimate is likely very conservative, as any mass operation over a short period of time would be more expensive and require additional costs which simply cannot be calculated at this time.

Removing One Million Undocumented Immigrants Per Year

In modeling cost of finding and arresting roughly one million undocumented immigrants per year, we assume roughly 20 percent of the undocumented population would voluntarily leave during a multi-year mass deportation operation. Therefore, we calculate that the total population to arrest would be 10.6 million in total and take roughly 10.6 years to carry out if arrests were maintained at that level.

Evaluating the cost of a removal target of one million allows us to consider additional costs associated with personnel and other capital expenditures. At a rate of 32.27 arrests per Fugitive Operations employee, that suggests that increasing fugitive arrests to one million per year would require hiring an additional 30,989 ICE employees. At this size, ICE’s fugitive operations program would become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.

At a cost per employee of $200,610, and presuming an annual employee attrition rate of 6.1 percent, employee costs to grow the workforce sufficiently to meet initial arrest goals would be roughly $6,216,700,000. In addition, we conclude that increasing arrests to 1,000,000 a year would require increasing the agency’s current non-pay costs to $154,358,000 per year, along with the costs of transportation stated above.

This highly conservative estimate excludes the substantial costs of additional human resources, management, information technology, and other personnel at DHS necessary to support this increased workforce, nor does it consider whether hiring over 30,000 new employees would be possible in a year.

Taken together, and presuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent, we conclude that an operation of this size over the course of 11 years would cost an estimated total of $77.4 billion, or an average of $7 billion per year.

The Cost of Detention

After arresting removable noncitizens, ICE generally transfers those in its custody to a detention facility where the agency determines if the person must remain in custody during the pendency of any legal immigration process to which they are entitled. While certain individuals are subject to mandatory detention, others are eligible for release on bond or their own recognizance. However, we assume that any one-time operation deporting 13.3 million people would require systematic detention of each individual prior to deportation, and many public proposals for mass deportation have explicitly called for the creation of many new detention facilities. As a result, for this report, we consider the costs of detention for all 11 million people potentially subject to deportations, as well as the additional 2.3 million new arrivals from 2023 through April 2024. We do not consider capital expenditures and inflation in this single-operation model because we lack adequate comparators to estimate the costs of suddenly ramping up production of detention facilities, personnel, and other resources needed to conduct such an operation.

Detained individuals may include both single adults and families. For the population present through 2022, we estimate that about 985,000 unauthorized noncitizens are under 18. We assume for the purposes of this analysis that every one of these children lives with at least one undocumented parent or legal guardian, and therefore estimate that about two million parents and children would likely be held in family detention facilities. The other nine million undocumented individuals would be held in adults-only facilities. For the population that entered between 2023 and April 2024, we identified the number of unaccompanied minors and make the same assumption. We arrive at two million adults and 300,000 family members.

This is important as costs paid by ICE’s Custody Operations, which oversees the immigration detention system, differ for operating detention facilities for single adults and for families. ICE has provided estimates of the daily bed rates for each, but bed-rate estimates only include direct costs—excluding the salaries of its Deportation Officers (DOs). These are critical costs: DOs process detained individuals who are entering and leaving the facilities, address their requests and grievances, and are responsible for managing their cases. The mass detention of individuals will undoubtedly require an increase in DOs.

To estimate the cost of detention including personnel costs more accurately, we used estimates based on the budget for ICE Custody and Operations between FY 2017 and FY 2020. For single adults, we estimate the average daily rate for detention to be $236.52 per person and for a single person in a family detention center, $481.79.

The length of time individuals stay in detention also varies. Between FY 2017 and FY 2020, we estimate that single adults spent 54.7 days in detention on average, while families spent 23.5 days.

Combining the average daily cost of detaining an individual with the number of days that individual will be in custody gives us the total cost for detaining each undocumented immigrant targeted for mass deportation.

Removing 13.3 Million People in a Single Operation

Under our model, the total cost of detaining 11 million undocumented immigrants in a single mass deportation operation comes to an estimated $139 billion. If we include the costs of detaining the 2.3 million new arrivals from 2023 through April 2024, we expect an additional $28.8 billion in costs. Therefore, we estimate the total detention costs for a single mass-deportation operation at $167.8 billion.

This is undoubtedly a conservative estimate. In general, ICE uses detention more often for individuals with criminal records or those who are recent migrants arriving from the border. These populations have fewer paths to remaining in the United States and are thus more likely to be removed within a short period of time, keeping average length of stay figures relatively short. During a mass deportation operation, we assume that many targets would not fit these profiles and would be eligible for and likely to apply for relief from removal. This would lead to a significant increase in the average length of stay in detention and a significant increase in the overall costs necessary to detain the population. However, given the uncertainties involved, we did not attempt to estimate the extent of this cost increase.

Removing One Million Undocumented Immigrants Per Year

To model the potential costs of expanding detention, we again presume that 20 percent of the undocumented population would leave on their own throughout the multi-year process, leaving a population of 10.6 million who would need to be held in detention pending removal. We also presume that anyone not physically detained would be placed on electronic surveillance under ICE’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program. The most recent cost estimate for an ATD is $4.07 per individual per day.

ICE’s current detention contracts include a guaranteed minimum of 29,790 beds. However, including additional capacity at these and other facilities, ICE has most recently detained over 39,000 people in early 2024. In the Fiscal Year 2024 budget, Congress provided ICE with sufficient funding to detain 41,500 people at any given time. This is far below the minimum number of beds needed to detain and remove one million individuals each year.

Thus, we consider the costs of expanding ICE’s detention capacity throughout the period it would take to remove all undocumented individuals at a rate of one million deportations per year, in addition to the costs of placing all arrested individuals who could not be detained at the time of their arrest on an ATD.

While ICE could use unused beds in jails or prisons across the country to expand its capacity, it is unclear how many are available or equipped to detain individuals for civil immigration violations. Instead, we use the costs incurred by CBP to build soft-sided detention facilities in recent years. This is a useful comparator due to the relative speed at which they can be built. We also assume DHS would be able to obtain the land necessary to build these facilities, including the use of military bases as it has done in the past. Using the costs related to building a 500-bed facility, we estimate that it would cost $35,910,000 to build one such soft-sided facility and $47,950,000 per year thereafter to sustain it (after adjusting for inflation).

If ICE could remove one million unauthorized immigrants per year, it would take a little less than 11 years for the agency to remove all 10.6 million undocumented individuals. Starting with ICE’s current number of detention beds and estimating that ICE would want to expand its capacity to detain as many individuals as possible by the 11th year, ICE would need to construct 216 soft-sided facilities per year to have enough detention space.

Accounting for annual inflation of 2.5 percent, the construction of 216 soft-sided facilities per year until all undocumented immigrants are detained, and the placement of all individuals who are arrested but cannot be detained in Alternatives to Detention programs, we expect a total cost of $728.3 billion, or an average of $66.2 billion per year.

The Cost of Legal Processing

Most noncitizens who are apprehended in the United States are placed in an adversarial administrative proceeding before an immigration judge (IJ). The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) under the Department of Justice (DOJ) oversees the immigration court system. The federal government is represented by an attorney from ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA). While U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) also plays a role in removal proceedings , it is nearly impossible to predict the share of its non-fee-funded costs related to removal proceedings; furthermore, most costs would be borne by EOIR and OPLA. As such, our cost estimate focuses on those two agencies.

Removing 13.3 Million People in a Single Operation

To model the one-time costs associated with the legal processing of the undocumented population, we consider the annual number of cases completed in comparison to the overall budget approved by Congress and expended by the agency. In the past few years, EOIR’s pending caseload has increased dramatically. We use the number of completed cases per year because it gives us a sense of EOIR’s capacity to adjudicate cases, especially as it has increased its personnel in the past few years. We acknowledge that some budgetary resources will be spent on processing cases that remain pending at the end of the fiscal year, which will not show up in the completed caseload. However, the converse is also true: each completed case may have incurred costs in prior fiscal years. Considering the massive growth in the immigration court backlog, we use FY 2023 budget information to estimate legal processing, which we believe best captures the costs of processing pending cases alongside completed ones.

In FY 2023, 734 immigration judges completed 525,819 cases. That year, the agency’s budget was $860 million. We used these numbers to estimate the cost per case, which is $1,719.57.

A similar approach is taken with OPLA. In FY 2023, the agency reported completing 460,000 cases. The discrepancy between this and EOIR’s figures may be explained by OPLA’s acknowledgement that this estimate is based on its case management system and not verified against EOIR’s databases. Nevertheless, given the lack of other reliable data on OPLA’s work capacity, it provides us with a figure to calculate how many cases OPLA was able to prepare given its budget in FY 2023.

To estimate costs associated with OPLA, we use ICE’s Budget Execution and Staffing Reports. Using the September report for FY 2023, we see that the total obligations incurred by OPLA during that year amounted to $372,059,000. Unfortunately, EOIR does not provide an equivalent expense report to the public. We estimate that it costs OPLA $850.37 to complete each average case.

Under our model, the total cost of processing 11 million undocumented immigrants in a single mass deportation operation comes to an estimated $28.2 billion. If we include the costs of processing the 2.3 million new arrivals from 2023 through April 2024, we expect an additional $5.8 billion in costs. Therefore, we estimate the total processing costs for a mass-deportation operation at $34.1 billion. We presume that this is an conservative estimate, as it does not take into consideration the fact that long-term undocumented immigrants are more likely to be eligible for and apply for relief from removal, which would increase the average length of time per case and reduce the total number of cases the average judge could hear in a year.

Removing One Million Undocumented Immigrants Per Year

Immigration court processing presents a key limiting factor in the government’s ability to remove one million unauthorized immigrants per year. We again use a 20 percent population attrition rate to arrive at the number of undocumented noncitizens who would be subject to legal processing at 10.6 million people.

Using the information obtained from the one-time model, we estimate that each one of the 734 IJs in FY 2023 completed an average 716 cases annually.

We make one key change in this model compared to the one-year model regarding OPLA’s capacity: we assume OPLA will be able to complete the same number of cases as EOIR, ignoring the discrepancy in self-reported completions between the two agencies. We made this change with the assumption that part of the discrepancy between the agencies’ figures is due to different ways of tracking case processing timelines, and to ensure that all cases of the undocumented population are completely processed and at the same rate as EOIR across the multi-year model.

With these figures, we estimate that EOIR will need to hire 181 IJs per year to fully process 10.6 million cases within 11 years. This estimate includes a personnel annual attrition rate of 23 IJs per year as IJs either retire or otherwise leave the position. This means that EOIR, considering this attrition rate, would have to hire 181 IJs to net an additional 158 IJs per year. We use the per-case completion cost estimates derived using the agency’s FY 2023 budgets as well: $1,719.57 per case for EOIR and $850.37 per case for OPLA.

In addition, we consider that EOIR would need to expand its courtroom capacity. As of January 2024, the agency had 601 courtrooms available for its 734 IJs. If EOIR had to add a net number of 158 IJs per year, the agency would need to add new rooms to conduct hearings too. EOIR estimates that it is a two-year process to build and occupy a new court. However, in 2019, DHS built “tent courts” within months to implement the Migrant Protection Protocols. Two of these courts, in Laredo and Brownsville, TX, had a combined capacity of 10 courtrooms for IJs to hold administrative hearings (formally called master calendar hearings). According to a top DHS official, building these two facilities again would incur a one-time cost of $16.0 million dollars to build and a cost of $143.3 million to operate annually, adjusted for inflation. If we presume that EOIR’s current ratio of courtrooms to IJs (0.82 courtrooms for every one IJ) is sufficient, EOIR would have to build more than 1,100 tent-style courtrooms to accommodate its newly hired IJs over the nearly eleven-year period.

Using these figures, and accounting for a 2.5 percent annual inflation rate over the 10-plus years it would take to process all these cases, we estimate that it would cost a total of $138.9 billion, or an average of $12.6 billion per year.

The Cost of Removals

The final step of the removal process involves physically repatriating a person to their home country. For individuals who are not permitted to voluntarily repatriate through commercial air flight, this process is carried out by ICE’s Transportation and Removal Program (TRP). For individuals from Mexico, this process generally entails transportation to the U.S.-Mexico border by bus or airplane, after which the person is repatriated by land (some individuals are also repatriated by flight to Mexico City). Individuals from Canada can be deported by ground transportation. Individuals from every other country can only be repatriated by air. ICE does not have its own fleet of planes. Instead, its “ICE Air” operations are operated by contractors who provide the planes and pilots.

Many countries are “recalcitrant” and largely do not permit the United States to carry out deportation flights (or permit only a handful of flights per year). These countries include places such as Russia, China, Venezuela, India, and Mauritania. That means that even if the United States could obtain removal orders for every undocumented immigrant from those countries, it could not deport those individuals unless a third country stepped up and agreed to take them. As a result, it is currently diplomatically impossible to remove all undocumented immigrants. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this analysis alone, we assume that every person can be repatriated to their home country, and that ICE would not use commercial air repatriations for individuals held in detention and ordered removed during a multi-year mass deportation operation.

Removing 13.3 Million People in a Single Operation

In 2023, Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson testified at a Congressional hearing that the average ICE Air removal flight cost roughly $17,000 per flight hour. We use this $17,000 figure as our baseline estimate for costs incurred in any removal flight. For individuals deported to Mexico, we conclude that roughly 10 percent would be deported by air (as ICE reported in 2016), while the remaining 90 percent would be deported by ground transportation.

ICE has never provided an exact cost of ground transportation. In 2007, at a time when the vast majority of ICE removals were to Mexico, agency officials indicated that the cost of removal transportation was roughly $1,000 per person. Adjusted for inflation, that figure is now $1,479.29. We estimate that roughly 4.8 million undocumented Mexicans and Canadians present in the U.S. as of 2022 (as well as an additional 340,000 Mexicans released after crossing the border between January 2023 and April 2024) would be removable by bus at a total cost of $7 billion.

For the 8.5 million individuals who were present as of 2022 or who arrived across the southern border after that point and would be removed by plane, we first calculated the average flight hours necessary to remove each nationality and then generated a cost per deportation flight per nationality. We estimate that the cost of removal flights for this population would be $17.1 billion in total.

Our estimate presumes that a mass deportation operation of this scale would require over 65,700 individual removal flights. That compares to an average of just 137.6 removal flights in the last year. In other words, to deport 13.3 million undocumented immigrants over a single event, ICE would have to find enough flight capacity to increase its annual removal flights by nearly 47,500 percent in a short period of time.

Under our model, the total cost of removing 11 million undocumented immigrants in a single mass deportation operation comes to an estimated $20.6 billion. If we include the costs of removing the 2.3 million new arrivals from 2023 through April 2024, we expect an additional $3.4 billion in costs. Therefore, we estimate the total removal costs for a mass-deportation operation at $24.1 billion.

Our estimate is undoubtedly conservative. We do not calculate the cost of building new staging facilities for deportation flights, as the choice of location and size would have a significant impact on cost estimates and is therefore impossible to calculate. We also know that previous efforts to dramatically increase removals have come at very high costs. In September 2021, following the mass crossing event in Del Rio, Texas—where over 10,000 Haitian nationals crossed the border in a three-day period—ICE signed an emergency air contract to run 44 removal flights to Haiti in a two-week period at an average per-flight cost of $179,079. Adjusted for inflation, this figure is roughly 26 percent higher than our estimate of the cost of a regular removal flight to Haiti in 2023 dollars. Therefore, we presume that the actual costs of any mass removal operation would likely be significantly higher than our estimate.

Removing One Million Undocumented Immigrants Per Year

Costs of removal would also be very high in any scenario where deportations were increased to one million per year. Assuming again for the purposes of this analysis that mass repatriations are possible even to countries which are currently “recalcitrant,” and that roughly 20 percent of the undocumented population would voluntarily depart during a mass removal operation, we estimate that 10.6 million people would still need to be removed.

Using the calculations above, we estimate that the average cost of a removal, either by flight or by bus, is $1,815.14. Therefore, we estimate the flight and bus cost alone to remove one million people per year at $1,815,140,000.

In order to reach a figure of one million deportations per year, the agency would also have to significantly increase its current staffing. From Fiscal Year 2015 through 2019 (before years impacted by the COVID pandemic), ICE averaged 245,026 removals per year at an average staff cost per removal of $69.95. Therefore, we estimate an annual staff cost of at least $69,950,000 per year. Accounting for annual inflation of 2.5 percent, we estimate that the costs of removing one million individuals per year would total $22.4 billion, or an average of $2.1 billion per year.

As with the prior estimate, this is likely a significantly conservative figure. Under this scenario, ICE would still be required to increase its removal flight capacity per year by 3,720 percent, which would likely increase the cost per flight hour significantly due to the current challenges in the aviation market of finding sufficient pilots and planes. We were also unable to estimate the additional costs necessary to obtain more charter aircraft for removals, given the impossibility of predicting the private commercial decisions that would entail.

Costs to the U.S. Economy

Labor Market Impact

Undocumented immigrants are more likely to be of working age than the U.S.-born. In 2022, 89.4 percent of undocumented immigrants were between the ages of 16 and 64, compared with 61.3 percent of the U.S.-born population. This helps explain the high labor-force participation rate of undocumented immigrants—three quarters of this population participated in the workforce in 2022. Despite comprising just 3.3 percent of the population, undocumented immigrants represented 4.6 percent of the country’s employed labor force, or 7.5 million people.

With an unemployment rate averaging under 4.0 percent since 2022, U.S.-born workers could not fill all the jobs of undocumented workers even if they tried to. The country is heavily reliant on an undocumented workforce in industries like construction, agriculture, and hospitality.

Nationally, mass deportation would remove 1.5 million workers from the construction workforce and 224,700 workers from the agriculture industry. Meanwhile, about one million undocumented workers in the hospitality industry would be deported due to their lack of immigration status; 870,400 in the manufacturing industry; 500,800 in general services, which includes things like auto repair, barber shops, and dry cleaning services; and 460,500 in transportation and warehousing.

More importantly, undocumented immigrants often take jobs that employers say many U.S.-born workers are not willing to take on, like cutting meat, washing dishes, or cleaning hotel rooms. In 2022, more than one third of the country’s plasterers and stucco masons, drywall installers and ceiling tilers, and roofers were undocumented immigrants. And about one quarter of construction laborers, agricultural graders and sorters, agricultural laborers, and housekeeping cleaners were undocumented workers.

Mass deportation would also lead to a significant loss of high-skilled talent for the United States. About 1.7 million undocumented immigrants have a bachelor’s degree or higher, making up 15.4 percent of the undocumented population. In addition, more than 457,800 undocumented immigrants were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities in 2022—students with the potential to help ease the country’s shortage for high-skilled workers after their graduation.

Impact on American Workers

Deporting undocumented workers would wreak havoc on industry, exacerbating labor shortages and triggering additional job losses for American workers. For example, if a shortage of construction workers prevents a house from getting built, the businesses that would be furnishing that house—from kitchen appliances to bedframes—lose business, too. Without field workers to pick crops, truckers have no goods to transport, and farmers have no need to buy new farm equipment.

Proponents of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants argue that it would raise wages for American workers. But past economic research suggests the opposite is true. In a literature review, economist Michael A. Clemens of George Mason University concludes that “the immigrants being targeted for removal are the lifeblood of several parts of the U.S. economy.”

When at least 400,000 Mexicans left the United States early in the Great Depression, often due to government coercion, the employment and wages of U.S.-born workers decreased slightly, with workers without a college degree affected most acutely. After the U.S. government ended the Bracero Program in the 1960s, excluding nearly half a million Mexican seasonal farm laborers, agricultural employment and wages did not rise for American workers as intended and farmers suffered long-term declines in income and land value.

One 2023 study looked at the economic effects of increased deportations under Secure Communities, a federal initiative that resulted in the deportation of an estimated 400,000 immigrants between 2008 and 2014, and found that when 500,000 undocumented immigrant workers were forced out of the country, 44,000 fewer jobs were held by U.S.-born workers.

This does not represent temporary layoffs, but persistent declines. “In the real economy,” Clemens writes, businesses respond by investing in industries and technologies that use less low-skill labor, “reducing demand for U.S. workers, too.”

Mass deportation would also affect one million undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs, who generated $27.1 billion in total business income in 2022 and provide jobs for American workers. About 30 percent of these undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs work in construction, 18.7 percent in professional services, and 16.6 percent in general services. They also include 157,800 undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs in local businesses that provide essential goods and services in neighborhoods across the country—such as grocery stores, restaurants, clothing shops, and gas stations—which have become an integral part of community life and source of local jobs for Americans.

Additionally, many Americans are members of households that would be directly impacted by mass deportation: the 8.5 million U.S. citizens who are part of mixed-status families. Deportation will lead to a decrease of $51,200 in annual household income for these families, or 62.7 percent of their total household income, on average.

Macroeconomic Impact

In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars mass deportation would cost the U.S. government, mass deportation would result in losses of tens of billions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax revenues, and of trillions of dollars in economic output for the country due to loss of workers, economic activities, and consumer spending.

Undocumented immigrants pay sales and excise taxes on goods and services, like food and utilities; property taxes through rent or home ownership; and income and payroll taxes automatically deducted from paychecks or paid through filing income tax returns. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes.

Yet undocumented immigrants are unable to benefit from many of the programs they pay into, including Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. As the U.S. population ages, the loss of these payments will make it increasingly challenging for social safety net programs to remain solvent.

Deporting all the undocumented immigrants would also result in the loss of their purchasing power— $256.8 billion in 2022 alone—that could be spent on goods and services to support U.S. businesses and sustain jobs for American workers.

Overall, mass deportation would lead to a loss of 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent of U.S. GDP, or $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars. In comparison, the U.S. GDP shrank by 4.3 percent during the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009.

Deporting all undocumented immigrants would result in a loss of....

Conclusion

With undocumented immigrants now comprising nearly one in every 20 workers, the long-term costs of a mass deportation operation, while difficult to gauge, would undeniably be enormous. American businesses would struggle to fill essential positions and, as a result, curtail the hiring of U.S.-born workers and immigrants authorized to work. Higher prices and inflation would follow, placing financial strain on all Americans.

Similarly, the ultimate effects of standing up a mass deportation operation on the United States government—and citizens’ relationships with it—can be broadly predicted, if not thoroughly quantified. Widespread “fugitive operations” in which ICE agents burst into homes and businesses across America would become one of the most visible symbols of the federal government. All Americans—especially those living in heavily-immigrant neighborhoods, or whose ethnic background allowed them to be stereotyped as “foreign”—would likely have to prove, repeatedly, that they are not deportable. Standing up dozens of soft-sided facilities would put detention camps within sight of many Americans.

The cost to U.S.-born Americans, in tax dollars spent and in economic output lost, pales in comparison to the devastation that undocumented immigrants and their families would suffer. Uprooted from their homes and communities after decades in the country, they would face an uncertain future and the potential separation of their families, which include millions of U.S.-citizen children who have known only this country as home.

To speak of the enormity of the fiscal and economic costs of mass deportation is not to minimize the importance of this suffering. It is to reinforce just how radical a step a deportation campaign targeting millions of undocumented immigrants, who have been so integral to the U.S. economy and American communities, would be. There is no way to engage in mass deportation without fundamentally changing the federal government, the national economy, and, ultimately, America itself.