For now, everything is imaginary. “The largest deportation in history,” the oft-repeated promise of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, is a nebulous scenario, a hypothetical without precedent or explanations as to how it would be carried out. In any case, 54% of the country’s voters support him. Without offering proof, Trump repeats in rallies or interviews that, although the most recent official figure indicates that there are, including minors, some 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, he believes that the number is closer to 15 or 20 million. He also says that the expulsion of immigrants would begin on the first day of his second presidency, if he wins.
It is not clear how the Republican would implement this historic policy. Project 2025, the ultra-conservative manual written for a hypothetical second Trump term, outlines some ideas. The image it paints is of a police state with massive internment camps along the border. But another question remains unanswered, not even superficially: how much would all this cost?
The official election platform reads like any Trump campaign speech, offering 20 promises that are more like slogans than concepts. The first two are capitalized: “Seal the border and stop the invasion of migrants” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” Nothing more. For Trump and the Republicans who follow him, the idea is apparently sensible because it would create jobs and get supposed “migrant criminals” out of the country. Figures show that crime is down and that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native population, but the former president maintains that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the nation,” a slogan that echoes words used by the Nazis.
“The largest deportation in history” would logically have a huge economic impact, both in its operational cost and in its long-term economic repercussions. A 2015 study by the American Action Forum, a think tank The self-described “center-right” economics group estimated that it would cost $18,214 per person to identify, detain, transport, process, hold, and ultimately expel. That works out to $24,094 today, adjusting for inflation, for a total bill of $265 billion to deport the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the country. If the $20 million figure touted by Trump and his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, is applied, the cost would be about $481 billion. To put those numbers into perspective, ICE, the immigration agency currently charged with deporting those in the country illegally, and CBP, customs and border enforcement, had a combined budget of nearly $30 billion in 2024.
The agency’s own data can also be used. In its 2023 report, ICE reported that it deported 142,580 “non-citizens” and spent more than $420 million, which works out to a cost of nearly $3,000 per person deported. Multiply that by 11 million people and the cost comes to $33 billion to remove the undocumented immigrants currently in the country, and nearly double that if the number of deportations were 20 million. This only refers to removal and does not take into account, as the previous calculation does, the price of running a program to find immigrants, transport them to the border, and process them in internment camps, which would have to be built.
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As Trump himself has said and is also indicated in Project 2025, to cope with the massive deportation effort it would likely be necessary to incorporate local police forces, the National Guard and even the military into immigration efforts. This is not allowed under current regulations, but even if it were, it would also entail an enormous cost that is difficult to estimate and would have to be added to existing calculations. In any case, the caveat serves to warn that these two calculations, just a couple of several that have been made, are probably very conservative.
The bill for “the largest deportation in history” goes beyond the cost of implementing it. It would wreak havoc on the country’s economy: it would first affect the labor market and wages, but impacts on GDP and inflation have also been estimated. Despite the difficulty of monitoring the labor market for undocumented people, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that there are 7.1 million undocumented migrant workers in the United States, representing 4.5% of the country’s workforce. If Trump expels them all, the most affected sectors would be construction, with 1.5 million fewer workers—which would increase the costs of building, increasing the already historically high price of housing—; the hospitality industry, which would lose 1.1 million workers; the service sector, with another million lost employees; and manufacturing, with 714,000.
The aftershocks of the earthquake, which would mean losing 4.5 percent of the country’s workforce, would be profound. It’s impossible to estimate exactly because of the number of variables at play, but a model called Okun’s Law, which charts the relationship between unemployment and GDP, suggests it would slow GDP growth by more than nine points — at the peak of the Great Recession in 2008, GDP growth fell by 4.3 percent. But Okun’s model has been used on a smaller scale and can be much less accurate when it comes to mass deportations.
A more modest study, but one specifically on deportations, found that they also mean job losses for native-born people, in the wake of the broader economic impact. One calculation derived from the study found that for every million workers expelled, 88,000 American jobs would be lost. If 7.1 million migrant workers were expelled, that would mean 968,000 citizens would lose their jobs as well.
The impact would not end there. A mass deportation program could also reignite inflation. Labor costs account for, on average, about 60% of business expenses, and they rise when employers have to replace large numbers of workers, as happened when restaurants, bars, and hotels reopened after the pandemic. Companies facing significant labor shortages have three main options: pay more for overtime, pay more to hire new workers, or accept lower productivity. In all cases, the additional costs usually lead to higher prices. In the case of losing seven million workers, the effect on inflation would threaten to be massive.
Seeing the future is an impossible task, and when it comes to economics the number of elements at play can derail any estimate. But if Trump can imagine that a country without 20 million undocumented migrants would be a paradise, the data can refute this image and throw up a much more sombre one.
