The Costs of Mass Deportation? Expert Breaks Down Trump’s Immigration Plan

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, with just over one week to go to the U.S. election, over the weekend, Donald Trump delivered one of the most extreme, angry, full of racist comments closing arguments in modern presidential history, calling illegal migrants, quote, “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals.” And if elected, he’d launch the largest deportation program in American history on day one. But how much would it cost? How could you do? How could you enact such a plan? The American Immigration Council has been crunching the numbers, and Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss that recent report.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, thanks so much for joining us. Your organization, the American Immigration Council, had put out a fascinating report recently. It’s titled “Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy.” Now, just — you went through this kind of theoretical exercise almost, and really just looked very specifically at what sort of costs it would be if we were to be able to do something like this. So, why write this now?

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK, SENIOR FELLOW, AMERICAN IMMIGRATION COUNCIL: Well, right now we are at a time where mass deportation has become a popular topic for politicians and policymakers to propose. And given that issue, it’s important for the public to understand, what does mass deportation actually mean? It’s not just some theoretical, amorphous idea, we’re talking about an U.S. law enforcement operation designed to round up over 13 million people over a period of time and to deport them outside of the United States. And that is a huge operation which would have dramatic consequences for the United States, its economy, and its people.

SREENIVASAN: Have we ever done anything like that? Have we ever moved that many people? This is now past, what, the population of North Carolina.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: The previous record operation carried out under President Eisenhower was focused mostly on Mexicans and, unfortunately, some Mexican-Americans who were, at the time, largely living around the U.S.-Mexico border, many of whom were migrant farm workers. But today, the undocumented population lives in every state, in every — in most communities and it represents a wide and increasingly diverse array of nationalities as well.

SREENIVASAN: One of the staggering numbers in this report was just a price tag for this. If we were able to carry out some sort of a mass deportation, you put the tag at $315 billion. How’d you come to that number?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yes, well, that number was calculated in the most conservative way possible, because it is the estimate just of the theoretical costs of a single one-time mass deportation operation, presuming no costs change currently. And we calculated that by looking at four individual costs. The costs of arresting people, the costs of detaining them, the cost of processing them for removal, and then the cost of actually carrying out those deportations. And we calculated an average cost, using today’s prices, per each part of that and multiplied it by the affected population. But that doesn’t take into account all the additional costs that would be needed to carry out this kind of staggeringly large operation, which is why we also developed an estimate for what it would take to deport 1 million people a year.

SREENIVASAN: So, let’s break that down here. The first one, $89.3 billion on arrests. Who would actually be able to carry out all of these arrests? You know, what agencies would be necessary? Do we physically have the manpower, so to speak, to do it?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Well, right now, ICE does not have that manpower. The agency has several internal divisions that carry out arrests of people in the communities, and the two big ones are what’s known as the Criminal Apprehension Program and the Fugitive Apprehension Program. And so, Fugitive Operations is the department inside ICE that goes out into the community and arrests people who are targets. And primarily those in the Criminal Apprehension Program are mostly going to state and local jails and picking up people who are already in custody. So, as you can imagine, that’s much easier. If somebody is already in jail, the federal officer just has to show up and have custody transferred. But if people are out in the community, you need to send officers out to do an arrest. And that is much more expensive. In the Trump administration, we calculated and looked at the Trump administration and really the error, which we have the best data for. So, that was 2016 through 2020. And during that period, the average ICE arrests during that period, fugitive arrests were less than 30,000. So, right now, the Fugitive Program is really only going after tens of thousands of people a year, but not that many overall, considering there are over 13 million potentially removable people in the country. And so, looking at that, the U.S. does not have that manpower right now and would either have to hire hundreds of thousands of people to do this in a short- term, or 31,000 people to do it for a million a year. And otherwise, if they couldn’t hire those people, they’d have to pull them from other law enforcement agencies, which means you would have the people investigating child pornography suddenly taken off to go after some grandma who’s been here for decades.

SREENIVASAN: Got it. So, then, you’re talking about the detainment costs, and for that you estimate $167 billion. Where would that take place if — whether it’s a million people a year or 13 million all at once?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: For this 13 million all at once estimate, that figure is massively conservative because that is the cost estimates using — presuming that there would be no additional costs incurred by detention. In other words, that the current cost per person for detention would not go up. But we know it would. Because if you look at other short-term detention facilities that the U.S. government has thrown up at the border, they’re called soft sided facilities used to hold migrants, they are much more expensive than the facilities currently used by ICE to detain people, which are usually jails and prisons that have been constructed, in many cases, you know, years ago or decades ago. Many of them are converted federal prisons owned by private prison contractors. And so, those costs are lower than building new facilities. And right now, if you look at official Bureau of — BOP statistics from the federal government, it shows that, you know, as of the end of 2022, there were 1.9 million people detained in jails and prisons around the country. That’s federal, state, and local jails and prisons. So, if you wanted to detain 13 million people, that means you would have to increase the national jail capacity by more than six times. And even if you wanted to detain a million people a year in ICE detention, you’d have to increase total capacity of all jails and prisons in the United States by more than 50 percent, and you cannot do that easily and you certainly can’t do that cheaply. You know, we’re looking at these soft sided detention facilities at the border, it cost more than half a billion dollars per 5,000 detention beds.

SREENIVASAN: Wow. The actual removal costs you estimate at $24 billion.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yes, and this is because the ICE air system is primarily run by contract air charter flight services, and the costs to operate those flights are very high. At a congressional hearing in 2023, Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson testified that the average cost per flight hour was around $17,000 per flight hour.

SREENIVASAN: We have talked about the costs of — the implementation of some mass deportation idea. What are the economic costs if we were theoretically to take 13 million people out of the existing U.S. economy and the roles that they perform today?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Estimates are that undocumented immigrants are anywhere from 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. workforce. And so, if you carry out mass deportations, you are shrinking the U.S. labor force significantly. And that is going to affect the overall economy, because it’s not the case that immigration is a zero-sum game, that if one immigrant comes here, that’s one American who doesn’t get a job. That’s because immigrants also help create jobs, not only through their consumer demand, but also because they often start businesses or help ensure that American businesses can stay active and keep hiring others. So, when you look at a mass deportation operation of this population, we estimate that mass deportations would lead to a drop in U.S. gross domestic product of anywhere from 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent. And I know that sounds theoretical, you can throw these numbers around, but for context, that is larger than the Great Recession. In the height of the Great Recession, there were 15 million Americans out of work.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, one of the framings that has been very successful for Former President Trump in his campaign speeches and rallies is that this is a zero-sum game, that Americans will be elected. given opportunities to get the jobs back that the illegal workers are taking. What’s wrong with that thinking?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yes, I mean, part of that is wrong because there is a labor shortage and there just simply aren’t enough Americans to take these jobs. You know, if you cut all of these people out of the population, there will be certain jobs that just will go unfilled. And as those jobs go unfilled, the firms that are trying to hire there, the companies, the businesses, many of them small businesses, they won’t raise their prices or adjust their prices and stay in business, they’ll just go out of business. And if they have Americans who are working there as well, and which you’ll find was very common, those Americans will lose their job too. One recent study found that for every 500,000 undocumented immigrants deported, 44,000 Americans lose their jobs. But beyond that, you’re also looking at the fact that undocumented immigrants work in a lot of the fields that help America thrive. You know, one in seven people who work in the entire construction industry, everything from day laborers, all the way up to the CEOs is undocumented. And in specific trades, that’s even higher. One in three roofers, drywall installers, stucco masons, and ceiling tilers, they are also undocumented. And you think it’s hard enough to get a contractor now or to pay for repairs, imagine if a third of the people doing those jobs suddenly weren’t here. The prices would go up and fewer people would be able to access those services. You wouldn’t suddenly see a huge increase in Americans taking those jobs. There might be some substitution, but it would not be 100 percent or if it was 100 percent, that could take decades and there would be significant economic downsides in the interim.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s walk through a little bit of Vice President Harris’ immigration policy as she’s laid it out. And does it, first of all, differ significantly from President Biden’s?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Well, it’s certainly different — is different from President Biden’s campaign policy promises back in 2020. But from what has been put out so far, it does not differ significantly from the Biden administration’s current approach, and that approach has — that has been developed really significantly over the last two years is basically what I’ve called the carrot and stick approach. The Biden administration is offering migrants alternate legal pathways to entering the United States, either through parole programs that people inside the United States can apply to sponsor people to come here or through the CBP One app, which is a means that people can essentially get in line to go through a port of entry along the southern border. And those who don’t use those tools are now being increasingly targeted for detention and deportation by the Biden administration. And we’ve seen the Harris administration largely adopt this, at least when it comes to the border. Inside the United States, the Biden administration is heavily pro- immigrant. Immigration enforcement is down. There are no mass raids like we saw under the Trump administration. And there’s no sign I’ve seen that the Harris campaign is suggesting it would start those kinds of mass enforcement operations again.

SREENIVASAN: So, is the policy working? I mean, because we had a record number of border crossings in 2023, right?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Well, we had a record number of apprehensions. It wasn’t necessarily a record number of crossings and that it’s because about 20 years ago, the statistics on apprehensions were much lower — were a little bit lower because most people crossing the border made it through without being caught. Today, the southern border is blanketed in surveillance cameras. We’ve got tens of thousands more agents than back then, and the majority of people coming across the border are taken into custody. So, apprehensions hit a record even while crossings arguably didn’t. But setting that aside, numbers are down. Numbers have been down significantly this year due to two things, due to the Biden administration reaching a deal with Mexico in late December of last year, and Mexico has now embarked on its harshest and record setting enforcement operation and the harshest and most record setting enforcement operation in Mexican history and also, the Biden administration in June began turning away asylum seekers who crossed the border between ports of entry by changing the process and raising the standard for people seeking protection. So, right now, September was the lowest border apprehensions of Biden’s time in office and, indeed, was about at the level of summer 2020 before Trump left office.

SREENIVASAN: Candidate Harris on the campaign trail constantly refers to the failure of the immigration reform legislation that she says failed in part because President Trump got on the phone and told the Republicans not to vote for it. Now, that bill, if it had gone through, what likely changes would we be seeing by today?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: I think the situation, at least when it comes to the southern border, would look somewhat similar. And that’s because the Biden administration’s June policies adopted some parts of that bill. However, the bill itself had — was not — was imperfect. It had created this border emergency authority that was mandatory, except at the times when it was voluntary, and it was at times voluntary, except when it was mandatory. And it was, in some ways, a little too committee driven to actually be great, effective, sensible policy. But that said, it also came with resources, and that is the thing the system needs more than ever. It would have led to the hiring of thousands of new asylum officers, hundreds of new immigration judges and more agents, more officers, more resources, which, as I’ve long argued, is the big issue right now. We have an under resourced asylum system that has been straining under its weight for years now, but Congress keeps trickling dollars and cents to it while pouring money into the enforcement side of things. And for the first time, this bill would have given the adjudication system a huge burst of funding.

SREENIVASAN: Is there kind of a pathway here for any sort of structural reform to immigration in 2024? Do you see a path to navigate?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Well, there’s a couple of paths. One is simply through education. A really fascinating new poll out of the University of Maryland found that when you actually explain to people what mass deportation is, that it means rounding people up and putting them in camps, that it means spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and then you compare it to a path to legal status for people who have been here for years without committing crimes, who pay back taxes and who pay a fine, they overwhelmingly prefer a path to legal status over mass deportation. Step two is to get Congress to act. Because the problem is this is a — this has been an issue for decades. The last time Congress made any major changes to our legal immigration system was in November of 1990, one month before the World Wide Web went online. And the last time that we made any changes to our immigration enforcement and asylum system was in 1996, in the height of the Macarena craze. So, we are using these 20th century relics to run our immigration and asylum system, and we haven’t changed that structure. And the thing is, there are more points on which politicians and the public agree on immigration than there are points that we disagree. And we have to keep focused on those and making the changes that we need while acknowledging that compromises are going to be have to made on both sides. But until we can have that adult conversation, unfortunately, I’m worried that we aren’t going to see progress in Washington.

SREENIVASAN: Senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, thanks so much for joining us.

REICHLIN-MELNICK: Thanks so much for having me.