Trump’s Deportation Plan Would Cost Nearly $1 Trillion
Former President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a “devastating” hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America’s gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.
Trump has promised to create a “deportation force” to round up undocumented immigrants and eject them from the country. This would entail targeting two groups: the roughly 11 million people who lacked permanent legal status as of 2022 (that’s the most recent number from the American Community Survey) and the estimated 2.3 million people who have entered the country without legal status since January 2023 (that figure come from the Department of Homeland Security).
The AIC report estimates that a mass deportation effort would cost an average of $88 billion annually—four times the annual budget of NASA—and $967 billion over a decade. To carry out such a program, the government would have to spend huge sums expanding immigration detention facilities, courtrooms, and other infrastructure. That would include hiring thousands of additional federal employees. In short, a mass deportation plan would be costly to set up, expensive to operate, and difficult to undo once it becomes established.
And for what? The costs of mass deportation would
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