President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to implement the largest deportation program in U.S. history, with Vice President-elect JD Vance estimating the removal of one million individuals annually. However, questions remain about the financial and logistical feasibility of such a program, as well as its implications for undocumented and legal immigrants alike.

In a media briefing on Nov 15, hosted by Ethnic Media Services, a panel of experts discussed how Trump’s immigration plans are going to affect current immigrants and future generations.

Speakers

  • Jeremy Robbins, Executive Director, American Immigration Council
  • Greg Chen, Senior Director of Government Relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA)
  • Elizabeth Taufa, Policy Attorney & Strategist, Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC)
  • Julia Gelatt, Associate Director of our U.S. immigration policy program, Migration Policy Institute (MPI)

Trump’s Mass Deportation: Challenges and Costs

Census data suggests there are approximately 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., representing 3.5% of the population—a figure up by 800,000 from the previous year but still below the 2008 peak of 12 million. The largest annual number of interior deportations recorded was 238,000 in 2009, highlighting the scale of the logistical challenge.

“Currently, most people we deport are already in detention … With mass deportations, however, we’re talking about finding people in their communities,” said Jeremy Robbins. “The two branches of the Department of Homeland Security that specifically do that do not have the capacity. It’s extremely expensive … Nor do we have the detention capacity. You’d need a whole new set of asylum facilities and judges before even getting people home.”

Estimates suggest that deporting all undocumented immigrants—who constitute 4.8% of the U.S. workforce—would cost $315 billion and reduce GDP by 4.2% to 6.8%, comparable to the 4.3% economic contraction during the Great Recession.

Robbins added that funding these measures would require bipartisan Congressional support, which is unlikely. The DHS’s $107.9 billion budget for fiscal year 2025 already surpasses all other federal law enforcement budgets combined. “It’s possible to use forms like the military, but our resources are already strained.”

DHS data reveals that during the first 26 months of the Biden administration, 5 million arrests were made, with 51% resulting in removal—outpacing the Trump administration’s record. This underscores the already high utilization of resources under existing enforcement policies.

Impacts on Legal Immigration

“Trump has been talking so much about mass deportations that we rarely hear about impacts on the legal immigration system,” said Greg Chen. Legal immigration numbers dropped significantly during Trump’s first term, from 1,183,500 new permanent residents in 2016 to 707,400 in 2020. By 2023, these numbers had rebounded to 1,173,000.

During Trump’s first administration, processing times for employment and family visas often doubled due to understaffing and an increase in Requests for Evidence—steps that, while intended to prevent fraud, created significant backlogs. “It simply becomes red tape … and if immigration is unavailable to people who are trying to come here through legal means, we’ll be seeing greater amounts of illegal migration,” Chen warned.

As of now, immigrants can apply for humanitarian parole at official border crossings via the CBP One app, but waits are long. Julia Gelatt explained that under Trump, such processes would likely end, leaving many without legal avenues for asylum. “Instead, we’ll likely see what we’ve seen before: people paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States, rather than to the border, where many people now present themselves to border authorities to ask for protection,” she said.

Trump’s proposed policies also include rolling back Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which covers over one million immigrants, and ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), relied upon by 580,000 individuals. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that a president can terminate DACA, such actions would have wide-ranging consequences.

Economic and Community Consequences

“Most employers want to hire a legal workforce. If their workers lose authorizations like DACA and TPS, they’ll have to let them go,” Gelatt noted. “We’re an aging country … and when we lose immigrant workers, it doesn’t necessarily create jobs for U.S. workers. If an employer loses the immigrant workers they rely on, they might contract out their operation or close up shop altogether. Immigrants and US workers are compliments in the labor force.”

Despite historically low unemployment rates among U.S.-born workers—3.6% in 2023—mass deportations could destabilize labor markets. Prime-age employment among U.S.-born workers reached 81.4% in 2023, the highest since 2001, but immigrants play a complementary role in many industries, such as healthcare and education.

Elizabeth Taufa highlighted the broader social impacts: “It looks like kids not going to school because their parents fear being deported, shortages of health care workers because people move to safer states or are removed from the country, like shortages of teachers here on TPS and DACA,” She added, “Even if they can’t afford to enforce these policies, they’re unraveling the threads of our American communities.”

The Road Ahead

While Trump’s proposed immigration crackdowns promise to reshape U.S. policies, they face significant logistical, economic, and political hurdles. Experts caution that these measures could cause widespread harm to the economy and immigrant communities while failing to deliver on their promises of national security and economic revitalization.

 

Images provided by EMS.