Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign emphasized two key promises far and beyond any others: to lower grocery costs—and inflation overall—and to enforce mass deportations of scary brown and Black immigrants (even those who are in the country legally).
Already, Trump has shrugged his shoulders at the first promise, saying there’s little he can actually do to lower prices.
“Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,” he said.
Now Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan is also walking back his mass deportation promise.
CNN reported earlier this week that Homan has been privately telling Republican lawmakers that deporting millions of immigrants might be a tad … impossible.
“We are not having a discussion about 20 million [deportations],” Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California, told CNN. “We are having a discussion about an order, and priority, and expectation.”
The expectation, of course, is that the federal government has nowhere near enough manpower or funding to expel that many immigrants.
In fact, the American Immigration Council has estimated that it would cost nearly $1 trillion (with a “t”) to deport that many undocumented immigrants over a decade. Suffice it to say, this government isn’t scaring up an extra $88 billion this year to get the ball rolling. Democrats might not even need the filibuster to stop such a monstrosity in the Senate.
As I’ve written beforethe reality is that mass deportations only work with the assistance of local and state law enforcement. The U.S. Border Patrol only has 20,000 agents, 17,000 of whom patrol the border (that isn’t about to stop, is it?). And as the CNN article cites, Homan said that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only 6,000 officers—not nearly enough to deport millions of people.
As Trump’s former Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan said in an interview with Stateline“It’s not going to be successful, as long as we have sanctuary cities and states that refuse to allow local and state police departments to work with ICE.”
That’s all well and good in places like Texas and Florida, where 6.4% and 5% of the population is undocumented, respectively. While local authorities might love to help the feds raid cities like Houston, Dallas, and Orlando, there are still millions of undocumented immigrants in sanctuary states like California, Illinois, and New York. So while Trump could achieve some small-scale deportations, he doesn’t have the resources for high-profile raids.
Even in rural America, where farmers depend on the labor of undocumented immigrants, local politicians and industry groups (all Republicans, mind you) are sounding the alarmwarning of economic devastation if the feds—with or without local help—move in.
So what is Trump to make of this?
Xenophobia has been a key pillar in Trump’s reelection, and his party has gleefully followed along. But this is also the same party that pretends (sometimes) to care about budget deficits and the national debt, which would explode with an additional $1 trillion in expenses. While most Republicans don’t care about such things when they are in power, the razor-thin GOP margin in the House means it wouldn’t take many of them to derail these efforts.
And those aren’t the only costs to deportation.
“It will cost a lot to deport. But guess what? It will also save a lot. And it’ll be a net benefit,” hard-right xenophobic Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona told CNN.
There is a false yet religiously held belief in right-wing circles that undocumented immigrants are costing good, hardworking Americans billions in tax dollars. The reality is the exact opposite: Those immigrants pay payroll and income taxes on their earnings, yet they’re ineligible for most public programs.
“Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, we found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2 to 6.8 percent,” according to the American Immigration Council. “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.”
That’s a one-way flow of money, with none of it coming back to undocumented workers.
So what exactly are these “savings” that Biggs is talking about?
I looked hard, and the best I could find is stuff like this from Fox News: “President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration plan will be a ‘cost savings’ for the American people, former acting ICE Director Tom Homan told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, responding to a warning from the Wall Street Journal that carrying out the largest mass deportation effort in history could bear a hefty price tag. [The Biden administration] is paying for free airline tickets around the country, free hotel rooms at $500 bucks a night, free education, free medical care, and that’s in perpetuity.”
Note that they can’t find math to support their theory that undocumented immigrants are costing taxpayers money, just that the enforcement of immigration laws is costing money. Well, that won’t change no matter how many people are deported—people who, by the way, aren’t being given “free airline tickets around the country” or staying in any “free hotel rooms.”
So what now?
Republicans hope that tough anti-immigration rhetoric leads to “self-deportation,” but the existence of sanctuary states complicates things. If anything, internal migration from hostile states like Texas and Florida to sanctuary states like California and Illinois is far more likely.
Meanwhile, the demand for labor will be off the charts as the charred toxic remains of more than 10,000 homes, businesses, schools, libraries, and other structures in Los Angeles are cleaned up and rebuilt.
The potential flow of immigrants from red states to blue ones won’t just help the economies of those welcoming them with open arms, but it would also decimate local economies in hostile red states, driving up the costs of food, hospitality, and construction—among other things.
Expelling or driving out millions of their residents could also alter the demographics that have allowed Florida and Texas to gain up to eight congressional seats at the expense of mostly blue states.
That might not be such a bad outcome after all.
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