Trump wants a mass deportation program. How much could it cost?

Former President Donald Trump has promised that, if elected, he will carry out a massive deportation operation that some immigration and military experts agree is theoretically possible but also problematic, and could cost tens — even hundreds — of billions a year costs.

In fiscal year 2023 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers made 170,590 administrative arrests, an increase of 19.5% from the previous year, and more than any year during the Trump presidency.

Should he win a second term, Trump has pledged to expand this work exponentially and has proposed deporting all of the estimated 11 million people living in this country without legal immigration status.

His team has suggested at several points that they start with “criminals,” though they have provided few details about who would be prioritized.

One cost estimate: $88 billion – $315 billion per year

A new report of the American Immigration Council, an immigration rights research and policy firm, estimates that deporting even one million undocumented immigrants per year would cost more than $88 billion per year, for a total of $967.9 billion more than ten years.

The report acknowledges that there are significant cost variables depending on how such an operation would be carried out, and says the estimate does not take into account the loss of tax revenue from workers, nor the greater economic loss if people deport themselves and US companies lose labor .

A one-time effort to deport even more people in one year could cost about $315 billion, including about $167 billion to detain immigrants en masse, according to the report.

The two largest costs, according to the group, would be hiring additional staff to carry out deportation raids and building and staffing mass detention centers. “There would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass incarceration as an intermediate step,” the report reads.

Trump campaign officials agree that one of the biggest logistical hurdles to any mass deportation would be building and staffing new detention centers as an interim solution.

Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, has repeatedly said that if Trump wins the White House, his team plans to build facilities for between 50,000 and 70,000 people. By comparison, the entire 2022 U.S. prison and jail population, consisting of every person held in local, county, state, and federal jails and prisons, is currently 1.9 million people.

The American Immigration Council report estimates that to deport one million immigrants per year, the United States would need to “build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists.”

There are currently an estimated 1.1 million undocumented immigrants in the country who have received “final orders of removal.” These individuals could theoretically be removed immediately by ICE agents, but due to limited resources, ICE agents have lately instead focused on people who have recently arrived or are committing dangerous crimes.

“I think it’s possible they could implement this. The human resource issue would be the hardest thing for them to overcome. They would have to take ICE agents off the border if they want to go into the cities,” said Katie Tobin, a scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as President Joe Biden’s top migration adviser on the National Security Council, told ABC News.

ICE agents are currently assisting Customs and Border Patrol agents at the border, conducting expedited deportations of new arrivals who have recently entered the country illegally and providing logistical support to the Department of Homeland Security.

A new mandate to round up and deport individuals who have been living in the country for some time could mark a major change for the law enforcement agency.

The American Immigration Council report estimates that to carry out even one million deportations per year, ICE would need to hire about 30,000 new agents, “which would instantly make it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government,” the report said.

Trump campaign: Deportation costs less than migrant costs

The Trump campaign has argued that the costs of deportation “pale in comparison” to other costs related to housing and providing social services to recent migrants. “Kamala’s border invasion is unsustainable and is already tearing at the fabric of our society. Mass deportations of illegal immigrant criminals and restoring an orderly immigration system are the only way to resolve this crisis,” said Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the campaign from Trump. , ABC News said in a statement.

Trump has pledged to mobilize and federalize National Guard units to help with the deportation effort, which would likely be a first for the military.

Under US law, military units are not allowed to engage in domestic law enforcement, although Trump has proposed invoking the Insurrection Act, a sweeping law that could give him broader powers to direct National Guard units as he sees fit.

“We don’t like uniformed military at all in our domestic affairs,” William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University and founding director of the Institute on National Security and Counter Terrorism, told ABC News in a telephone interview. ‘The standard is that citizens always do it. The police, the state police, the city police, the sheriffs,” he continued.

Using the military for domestic law enforcement would be a fundamental shift, one that Banks says too few Americans are considering or struggling with.

“It would turn the whole society upside down… all these arguments about him being an autocrat or dictator are not exaggerated,” he said. For example, uniformed military officers are not trained in law enforcement, and if they were asked to make civilian arrests, significant conflict and violations of civil liberties could arise.

To target and deport immigrants who have not yet received “final orders of removal” but whose cases are still pending, Trump has talked about using another rare legal maneuver to give himself broad authority to target immigrants and to detain without a hearing, specifically invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law last used to detain Japanese Americans during World War II.

Trump would also need other countries to accept deported individuals and allow deportation flights to land back on their soil.

Katie Tobin, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President Joe Biden’s top migration adviser on the National Security Council, told ABC News: “Last time, the Trump administration didn’t hesitate to threaten punitive measures against countries that don’t did. to work with them on immigration, but there are some practical problems in terms of how many flights a country like Guatemala or Colombia can accept per week.”

There would also likely be less tangible and more indirect costs associated with a mass deportation. It is inevitable that there will be ripple effects throughout the economy. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes, according to the report, and “undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5, 7 billion in Medicare.”

The human toll

Experts also predict that if a future Trump administration were to implement a large, initial and highly visible deportation operation, a significant number of individuals and families would likely choose to deport themselves to avoid families being separated or having to spend time abroad . a military-style detention center.

The authors of the American Immigration Council report argue that the effect of a mass deportation program, as described by Trump and his advisers, would “almost certainly threaten the well-being” of even those immigrants with legal status in the United States and “even , potentially, naturalized American citizens and their communities.”

“They would live in the shadow of armed enforcement as the US went after its neighbors, and, as social scientists discovered under the Trump administration, tend to worry that they and their children could be next,” says the report.

In recent interviews and conversations with reporters, Trump’s running mate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has dodged questions about whether a future Trump administration would separate families during another deportation or in detention centers along the border.

“When a man commits gun violence and is taken to jail, that is separation from the family, which is obviously tragic for the children, but you have to prosecute criminals and enforce the law,” Vance told reporters in September while visiting the border.