Many unauthorized immigrants work hard to make ends meet, contributing to our communities and nation. They are often the backbone of key industries in agriculture, construction, and hospitality, among others. A policy of mass deportation would be disruptive to those industries and upend millions of lives. It also would have serious fiscal and economic costs for the federal government and American taxpayers.
A plan for deporting the entire unauthorized immigrant population — and perhaps some people stripped of their current protections such as Temporary Protected Status holders, DACA recipients, and humanitarian parolees — would require unprecedented resources and divert military and law enforcement personnel from other tasks. This could harm our national security and undermine public safety, sparking public outrage and raising major legal concerns.
If the United States were to carry out a mass removal of unauthorized immigrants, it would require billions in new enforcement and removal costs, including the cost of expanding and maintaining detention facilities. It would also require massive numbers of immigration judges and prosecutors to hear cases and handle the resulting backlog, which could reach tens of thousands per year.
The sweeping scale of mass deportation also raises significant human rights concerns, as well as the logistical challenges of physically repatriating individuals to their home countries. It is currently diplomatically impossible to remove individuals from countries that do not allow for voluntarily repatriation by commercial air flight (such as Russia, China, and Venezuela) without obtaining the cooperation of those governments or relying on the services of private contractors such as ICE Air.
Lastly, deporting the whole population of undocumented migrants would pull apart millions of mixed-status families. Almost eight million unauthorized immigrants live in households with U.S. citizens, and half of these are children. Removing all unauthorized residents from these households would reduce median household incomes by 47%, and it would push millions into poverty. It would also separate millions of children from parents they know and love, creating lasting trauma.
In addition, the visible nature of a large-scale deportation campaign would change how Americans view their government and could foster fear and division in our communities. The sight of a federal agency using weaponized enforcement to break into homes and businesses of long-standing neighbors would be upsetting, demoralizing, and dehumanizing. It might even prompt violent and vigilante behavior, which we have seen in the wake of other high-profile deportation campaigns. The deportation of 13.3 million people would change the way we think of our government and our nation. This explainer describes the steps in a typical deportation, which could occur after a run-in with the law or a raid and lead to detention or a deportation flight.