The cost of deporting the entire illegal immigrant population is a hard number to pin but a few groups have tried, and they put the estimate in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the wake of GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s call to deport illegal immigrants en masse, a population most recently estimated at 11.3 million people, the liberal Center for American Progress has updated its regular analysis of how expensive such a plan would be.
Using a base cost of $10,070 per immigrant, the think tank led by a former top Obama administration official on Tuesday said the federal government would have to spend $114 billion to make Trump’s plan a reality. That’s roughly the size of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
While many might guess that left-leaning groups would try to pump up the costs in order to discourage an idea they oppose, CAP’s estimate is far lower than the costs of deportation as estimated by the conservative American Action Forum in March. Apprehension and removal would cost between $100 billion and $300 billion, that group projected.
Once something costs $300 billion, it’s comparable to big federal agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services.
However, that think tank, which is led by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, goes further and adds in on-going enforcement expenses, for a total cost ranging from $420 billion to $620 billion. American Action Forum also predicted that it would take 20 years to fully carry out such a strategy.
At $600 billion, the cost of deporting all the illegal immigrants ventures near the cost of defense spending.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has said that in 2013 it cost the agency about $8,660 to deport one undocumented immigrant. Using that as a base, it would cost nearly $100 billion to deport everyone.
Estimates aside, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel noted last year that current appropriations would not begin to cover the costs associated with even the lowest projections. The office issued that warning in an opinion upholding the Homeland Security Department’s policy of prioritizing certain illegal aliens for deportation.
“The resource constraints are striking,” the opinion read. “Congress has appropriated sufficient resources for ICE to remove fewer than 400,000 aliens each year, a significant percentage of whom are typically encountered at or near the border rather than in the interior of the country.”
