If you want a definitive answer to that question, you won’t find it here, or anywhere, at this moment. Trump and his associates have spoken volumes about this, but we don’t know which of their many claims they will or can follow through on.
What do we know about the planned mass deportation?
All we know are Trump’s actions in the past and his promises for the future. He is threatening to end birthright citizenship so that children born in the U.S. will be considered undocumented immigrants. According to new Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been working on a deportation plan for years, “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”
And Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” is widely acknowledged as having created the 2018 family separation policy that authorized the kidnapping of more than 5,500 children at the border. From these statements and the administration’s past actions, we can only glean what the 2.0 mass deportation might look like.
ICE jail for immigrants in Texas, Getty Images, 2016
How can timely opposition help?
At UIDN people who were helping our immigrant neighbors settle and survive in the community are now wondering how they can help them avoid deportation. Across the nation, social service agencies and legal rights organizations are reviewing their priorities and looking for ways to protect undocumented people and their families.
Immigrants still have the rights granted them by the U.S. Constitution, and there is a consensus that they need to be deeply familiar with those rights. “Know Your Rights” campaigns will be ramped up to meet the anticipated challenges of the new administration.
But that will not be enough. During Trump 1.0, schools, hospitals, and churches were deemed sensitive spaces, and ICE was not allowed inside. Trump plans to rescind those protections, allowing ICE to make arrests in what should be places of refuge.
In the first Trump administration, many local governments, especially those of sanctuary cities, directed workers not to assist federal immigration enforcement officers. Trump shows every sign that he will respect neither sensitive spaces nor the protections afforded to those who live in sanctuary cities. Worse, he has threatened to end federal financial aid to states and localities that permit sanctuaries. He would need Congressional support, or at least neutrality, to accomplish that. And of course, he will need substantial House approved-new funding to pursue even a brief mass deportation policy.
The immense human, economic and financial costs of mass deportation can most effectively be countered if elected officials at all levels are well-educated about the harm that will be done in their districts, even by a limited version of the policy. We need those officials to hear from us, to recognize the harm the policy can inflict, and to join with their peers to generate an informed opposition among elected officials at all levels.
How many immigrants live here and how many are “undocumented”?
The American Immigration Council has looked closely at what would be required to fulfill the MAGA threats, and at what cost. Their report, published in October, is available on their website, a great place to get detailed information. Here are some basic facts:
- Over 50 million people – about 16% of the U.S. population are immigrants—people who came as non-U.S. citizens to live here.
- In New York, the foreign-born population is over 22% of all residents and accounts for 27.8% of the workforce.
- Immigrants range in age from infants to the elderly and include both recent arrivals and people who have spent a lifetime here. Many are U.S. citizens now; others are “lawful permanent residents” (such as green card holders) or are on a path to that status.
It is estimated that 13.3 million people – one quarter of all immigrants are officially “undocumented” —lacking citizenship, permanent resident status, or legal visas in the U.S.
The undocumented are Trump’s targets, but documentation is hard to obtain.
An immigrant’s path to “lawful permanent resident” (LPR) status is not easy, owing partly to U.S. immigration laws that strictly limit the numbers and categories of applicants who can be considered for lawful permanent residency, and to the way the government has applied those laws, no matter which party was in control of the White House and Congress. As long as documentation is withheld, an immigrant lives under a greater risk of deportation.
Still, massive deportation is not a simple policy to carry out.
Deportation is itself a formal process, defined by laws and conducted by trained, though under-resourced personnel. It involves four major stages: arrest, detention, legal processing, and removal.
The American Immigration Council (AIC) analyzed the costs of these components, based on two possible scenarios. The first, a mass deportation attempted in a single year, would be simply impossible even if 20% of undocumented immigrants elected to leave by choice to avoid deportation. The remaining 10.6 million deportees would need to be detained long enough for legal processing. But the total capacity of all local, state, and federal detention facilities is only 1.9 million detainees, and those facilities are already in use. Vast new “detention facilities” would need to be built and operated, likely by private prison companies. Massive new hiring and training would also be needed by ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the federal agencies that operate the immigration court system. Then too there would be the cost of physically removing deportees to a country that would accept them. If the new administration really does attempt massive deportation, it will need to launch a multi-year effort.
AIC has estimated the costs for a 10-year project, with one million deportations annually. Each year, the government would need to:
- Conduct a million arrests – $7 billion annually
- Construct and operate new detention facilities (equal to 24 times the current ICE resources) – $66 billion annually
- Carry out legal processing of one million detainees – $12.6 billion annually to create and operate thousands of new courtrooms
- Transport deportees to their next country – $2.1 billion annually
- Recruit and train between 220,000 and 450,000 additional personnel to manage arrests, detention facilities, and courtrooms – all this in a scarce labor market. –$6.2 billion
Total anticipated costs for these and related expenses are at least $88 billion in the first year. Over 10 years, with inflation, that would amount to nearly $1 trillion.
And what of the cost to U.S. economy? A million deportations each year would mean a significant loss of labor power, tax revenue, and consumer spending—all essentials of a healthy American economy.
Why does the government leave so many people in “undocumented” status?
You might wonder, with so many undocumented immigrants here, why the government has not followed up with mass deportation. Perhaps that will be easier to understand if we consider what the adults among these 13.3 million undocumented immigrants are doing here.
They are working, and at higher rates than American citizens. According to a May 2024 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023 foreign-born men participated in the labor force at an 11.4% higher rate than native-born workers. (Conversely, foreign-born women worked slightly less than American-born women.)
Undocumented immigrants make up a large portion of the work force in key industries: agriculture, construction, food processing and preparation, hospitality, and caregiving. They pay billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes and contribute to Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance, although they are not eligible for these benefits. They are literally paying for the rest of us to benefit from these social insurance programs. And, they largely work for low wages at jobs that many U.S. workers refuse to do.
If the undocumented workforce disappeared, there would not be enough domestic workers available to fill the vacancies. Inflation would increase; key industries in many local economies would shrink quickly, with similar consequences for their suppliers and customers. In short, the federal practice of keeping millions of immigrant families undocumented permits employers to hire millions of good workers at low wages, with little risk that these workers will be able to fight for better conditions.
The self-interested thinking of many business owners with large immigrant workforces is “Keep them undocumented but keep them here.” Both political parties have sustained this pattern for decades, through the laws that they pass and the plodding administrative systems they fund for getting a green card.
Our best preparation for Trump 2.0 is not only “Know your rights” education for immigrants, but also “Know how your community benefits from immigration” education for all Americans – especially political leaders.
Lies stoke fears.
Lately, Trump and Vance have presented immigrants as a major source of crime, including the theft (and eating!) of Americans’ household pets, a tale invented out of whole cloth. According to a 2024 study by the National Institute of Justice, violent and property crime rates among immigrants have consistently been well-below the rate among U.S. citizens. But the emerging Republican administration has only stepped up their campaign of painting immigrants as rapists and murderers. These lies have served their deportation agenda well.
Why have Trump and Republicans picked this moment to press for mass deportation?
Instead of attempting to fix the economic problems of lagging wages and lack of affordable housing and healthcare, the second Trump Administration has decided there is political gain in promising to disrupt the immigration status quo. While they are further enriching corporate elites, they have trained public attention on ridding the country of the most vulnerable—yet by some measure the most productive—among us.
Will the high costs of mass deportation change Trump’s mind?
We can’t count on it. He often fails to complete his threats, like stopping far short of building a border wall in his first administration. But he has carried out other threats that were predictably harmful (like raising tariffs that increased inflation and implementing the Zero-Tolerance policy that separated more than 2,000 children from their parents at the border).
Sooner or later, the extreme costs and harms of mass deportation may mobilize a very strong public opinion against it. Even if Trump is unmoved, other politicians may then resist him in their own interest. We saw this most recently when Trump and Musk tried and failed to defeat budget legislation and end a legal “ceiling” on national debt. The real challenge for most of us is to wake up the opposition before Mr. Trump has done his intended damage.
