What to keep in mind: Trump’s deportation operation
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| Photo credit: tedosius.com |
I’m kicking off this “what to keep in mind” as a reminder to myself and others of that what Trump 2.0 has stated it wants to accomplish. I want this to serve several purposes. One is to just keep this administration’s policies and goals firmly in front to remind everyone of what they voted for and what others voted to stop. I also want to post these to let folks know that we’re not powerless and that there are individuals and organizations that will be fighting on many fronts. Some, admittedly, will be more successful, some may not. But we can all find a community to share ideas, voices, and actions.
Today,, I’m looking at Trump’s deportation plan. Setting aside the immorality of it, the cost alone will be $88 billion in tax dollars. It will likely worsen housing costs and add greater stressors to the economy. Additionally, “ a deportation operation targeting millions would require many more officers, detention beds and immigration court judges. American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy group, estimated the cost of deporting 13 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally as $968 billion over a little more than a decade.”(1)
But let’s look at the human cost.
The plan is to build detention camps for between 13 dot 25 million people. Let that sink in. Many won’t be “illegals”. Many will be citizens born to undocumented parents or people with green cards. Some Trump advocates will likely say that that’s not a big deal; they’ll be released. Only that’s not the plan.
The next phase is to roll back citizenship from citizens who have been born in the. United States and to curtail or revoke green card status. The ramifications are myriad, but any assessment of what this will do to the labor market, retail costs, and most of all to communities ripped apart (yet again) is incalculable.
I saay “incalculable” in terms of the human cost, but what is calculable, more or less, is the disruption to the labor force and the economy. It’s calculable because the vast number of immigrants who are here are highly skilled but as usual what is operative here is that “immigration” itself and the metrics used to track it are not necessarily what politicians say it is or honest in how those numbers are used.
Gionvanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, told Newsweek that both Republicans and Democrats have mischaracterized just what immigration means, when it has mainly comprised of educated, high-skilled workers over the past 20 years.
"I have studied the economic impact of this type of immigration, not the fantasy type of immigration where 500,000 undocumented come in every year. That is not in the data," Peri said.
"High-skilled immigration has contributed a lot to U.S. entrepreneurship, innovation and the labor market, because these people generate growth of firms and job numbers."
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, jobs in farming, hospitality and healthcare have opened up, with a gap left by older Americans retiring and a lower number of younger U.S. citizens entering the workforce.
"The U.S. economy has become richer over time and older over time," Peri said. "Older and richer people have very high demands for healthcare, personal care, food, hospitality, transportation, which are typically employing a lot of immigrants.
"The demand for these services is high, but the supply of people who do these services has become lower and lower, because Americans have aged, become more educated and fewer do these jobs," Peri continued.
"So, from the low-skilled point of view, we have had too few immigrants for many years."(2)
But the ramifications remain and of course, economics isn’t just about the Dow. Jones. The effect this would have on the economy is likely to be catastrophic.
From the American Immigration Council:
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.(3)
I hope that you will take time to read their full report, but I’ll print their Key Findings as an Appendix.
There is a caveat of sorts that we may need to bear in mind. There will be various players who will be fighting this in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The ACLU is already gearing up for likely far more than the 464 (I think, doing that from memory) cases they brought against Trump the first time. There will also be battles between the administration and various states who will position themselves as “sanctuary states” (as opposed to “sanctuary cities” like we saw the first time around).
My immediate thoughts are to follow news agencies more than specific platforms. I quoted Newsweek here because their reportage is generally sound, but I prefer to start with AP or Reuters, track their sources and if necessary, get to the raw data and run my own reports (more like QA and just to ensure I’m not misinterpreting other people’s work.
Pro Publica(4), Al-Jazeera, the BBC, are usually my “first passes”; if a story or a data collection seems in need of follow-up, I find the source and repeat the process outlined above. It takes time, but it’s worthwhile.
I’m in Texas and the Texas Tribune is my first stop. The Houston Chronicle is solid, but I do check out the other cities’ papers online, as well.
What we can do
The usual: donate time and money to refugee advocacy organizations, write Op-Eds, write a blog, attend public meetings, protest, and don’t forget to badger your representatives. My congresswoman is wonderfully accessible, and many of our state reps are good about getting back to you/us. Whether they support your or my legislations is not always the point: it’s just letting them know that real people are watching and if you get enough people to badger a pol in office, they usually respond.
Would local changes affect what happens in the Capitol? With this administration, it’s difficult to see how that would be the case, but it’s always worth a shot.
The main thing is do what you think makes the most sense within your capacity to do, and see if there are likeminded folks around you can join in and work with.
Postscript
Let me know if you have names of organizations in your area that you’d like to share or voices you’d like to amplify. You can email me at johnlbarrettart at gmail.com or just post a comment here.
I want to put something up at least once a week that provides everyone with enough to resources to keep at hand and be able to research on their own, as well.
APPENDIX
Key Findings from The American Immigration Council’s Report on Deportation
Key Findings
- About 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States as of 2022—3.3 percent of the country’s overall population. An additional 2.3 million removable immigrants were released into the United States between January 2023 and April 2024 and would also be targeted in any mass deportation operation.
- A one-time operation to deport these immigrants would cost at least $315 billion, broken down as follows:
- The government would have to spend $89.3 billion to conduct sufficient arrests.
- The government would have to spend $167.8 billion to detain immigrants en masse.
- The government would have to spend $34.1 billion on legal processing.
- The government would have to spend $24.1 billion on removals.
- Deporting one million immigrants per year would incur an annual cost of $88 billion, with the majority of that cost going towards building detention camps. It would take over ten years, and the building of hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities, to arrest, detain, process, and remove all 13.3 million targeted immigrants—even assuming that 20 percent of that population would depart voluntarily during any multi-year mass deportation effort. The total cost over 10.6 years (assuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent) would be $967.9 billion. The annual costs would break down as follows:
- The government would have to spend an average of $7 billion per year to conduct one million arrests annually.
- The government would have to spend an average of $66 billion per year to detain one million immigrants annually, or surveil them on alternatives to detention programs while detention capacity ramps up to one million.
- The government would have to spend an average of $12.6 billion per year to carry out legal processing for an average of one million immigrants annually.
- The government would have to spend an average of $2.1 billion per year to remove one million immigrants annually.
- To carry out over 13 million arrests in a short period of time would require somewhere between 220,000 and 409,000 new government employees and law enforcement officers, which would be nearly impossible given current hiring challenges across law enforcement agencies. Even carrying out one million at-large arrests per year would require ICE to hire over 30,000 new law enforcement agents and staff, instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government.
- Mass deportation would exacerbate the U.S. labor shortage. In 2022, nearly 90 percent of undocumented immigrants were of working age, compared to 61.3 percent of the U.S.-born population aged between 16 and 64, making undocumented immigrants more likely to actively participate in the labor force. Losing these working-age undocumented immigrants would worsen the severe workforce challenges that many industries have already been struggling with in the past few years.
- Mass deportation would hurt several key U.S. industries that rely heavily on undocumented workers. The construction and agriculture industries would lose at least one in eight workers, while in hospitality, about one in 14 workers would be deported due to their undocumented status. Among those industries, certain trades would be hit even harder. Mass deportation would remove more than 30 percent of the workers in major construction trades, such as plasterers, roofers, and painters; nearly 28 percent of graders and sorters of agriculture products; and a fourth of all housekeeping cleaners.
- Among the deported would be 1 million undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs, who generated $27.1 billion in total business income in 2022. Losing the 157,800 undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs in neighborhood businesses would lead to disruptions to services that have become an integral part of community life and provide local jobs for Americans.
- The U.S. would lose out on key contributions undocumented households make to social safety net programs annually, including $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. As the U.S. population ages, the loss of these payments would make it increasingly challenging to keep social safety net programs solvent.
- Mass deportation would deprive federal, state, and local governments of billions in local tax contributions from undocumented households. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. After taxes, they were left with $256.8 billion in spending power, money that could be spent in local communities.
- Deporting undocumented immigrants would separate 4 million mixed-status families, affecting 8.5 million U.S. citizens with undocumented family members (5.1 million of whom are U.S. citizen children). It would slash the income of their households by an average of 62.7 percent ($51,200 per year).
- Overall, mass deportation would lead to a loss of 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent of annual U.S. GDP, or $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars. In comparison, the U.S. GDP shrunk by 4.3 percent during the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009.
- The negative impact would be the most significant in California, Texas, and Florida, the three states that were home to 47.2 percent of the country's undocumented immigrants in 2022 and where one in every 20 residents would be deported.
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