Contrary To Media Claims, Deporting Illegal Alien Criminals Will Save Taxpayers More Than It Costs
In testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, American Immigration Council (AIC) Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick remarked last week that mass deportations would cost “at a minimum” $316 billion.
The AIC estimates that there is an annual cost of $88 billion to deport one million illegal aliens each year. That breaks down to $7 billion for arrests, $66 billion for detentions, $12.6 billion to go through the legal process, and $2.1 billion to transport deportees out of the country. It works out to $88,000 per deportee, but the council claims this is a “highly conservative estimate.” They conclude there is “a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.”
But looking at the per deportee costs over recent years show a cost that is less than one-sixth of what the AIC estimates. Advocacy organizations such as AIC are out to create shock-value numbers.
News media outlets covered the $88 billion estimate extensively when they were released in October, shortly before the election. The AIC figures were cited uncritically in The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek as well as on ABC, CBS, and CNN.
Another estimate AIC put out, this “one-time” $316 billion cost of deporting 13 million, that was not reported by the media when they put out their report in October, comes to “at a minimum” $24,231 per deportee.
While President Trump says that there is “no price tag” too high for deporting illegal aliens, costs are sure to factor into American public support.
The numbers don’t include ongoing government subsidies for food and housing, so the additional cost for housing might be less than the $66 billion AIC claims.
The AIC’s estimates depend on a lot of assumptions. Take their estimated costs of detention, which account for three-quarters of their total estimate. To deport one million people in a year doesn’t mean that you have to have enough detention facilities to house one million people for an entire year. Even if you take AIC’s claim that people will be detained for a little under two months on average, that means you would only have to house about 167,000 at any point in time. Others put the average detention time at around a month, so you only have to build facilities to house 83,000 and, according to AIC, we already have the facilities necessary to house 41,500.
The AIC assumes each facility holds 500 beds, so 83 new facilities will have to be built. With each facility costing $35.91 million, that comes to a cost of $3 billion, a fraction of the $66 billion.
The problem with the AIC numbers is even worse than that because they must rebuild 216 completely new facilities each and every year, but that isn’t necessary as these facilities will last for years.
They also assume that the daily cost of detaining an individual is $237 and a family is $482. In the United States in 2022, the daily cost for prisoners in federal medium security prisons is $122.50, and for high-security prisons is $164.87. Privately operated institutions for federal prisoners are only $93.50 a day per capita.
Other estimates may already be obsolete, such as how long illegals will be detained in custody before being deported, even if they were ever correct. The length of detention depends on the home countries taking back these illegal, but President Donald Trump is now promising that “we won’t do business with those countries” that refuse to take back these migrants.
Instead of guessing numbers, like how much it costs for the government to rent a plane and how many passengers will be on it or how long individuals are detained, we can try to come up with our own much simpler estimate by looking at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) budget for Enforcement and Removal Operations. Then, we can compare it to the number of illegal aliens that ICE deported.
ICE’s budget doesn’t include legal process costs, but it also overestimates the costs to the extent that it includes some enforcement costs related to customs.
Compare the Enforcement and Removal Operations budgets available from 2015 to 2022 with the Immigration Enforcement Actions Annual Flow Reports. The 2023 annual enforcement actions report isn’t yet available.
To be conservative on these costs, we exclude expulsions due to Covid using Title 42, which averaged about 794,000 people from 2020 to 2022. While ICE spent on removing Title 42 deportees, these deportations are fairly inexpensive and will not occur in the future. Including these removals greatly reduces the per-person expulsion costs. For example, 88 percent of the deportations during the Biden administration’s first two years occurred using Title 42.
Deportations have clearly fallen over time. Yearly deportations during Bill Clinton averaged 1,536,363, George W. Bush’s administration had 1,255,779. Under Obama, there were 656,112. Trump had 448,852, and Biden carried out 316,953. These figures exclude expulsions due to Covid.
From 2015 to 2022, per capita deportation costs in 2024 dollars averaged $12,124. They range from $9,767 under Obama, $11,637 for Trump, and $15,499 for Biden. The higher numbers for Biden occurred as the budget rose, but the number of deportations excluding Title 42 fell significantly. AIC claims that the legal processing costs are $2,570. If we just assume that their estimate is correct, it raises the total per capita cost of deportation to $14,705. But even this is too high for several reasons, including the fact that 1.46 million illegals have already had their deportations approved by U.S. Department of Justice immigration judges.
Even if we include the entire Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget, which involves many other customs activities, the per-deportee costs from 2002 to 2022 average $13,706 in 2024 dollars. The year with the most deportations, 2004, saw 1.4 million deportees with a total ICE budget in 2024 dollars of $6.1 billion, or $4,354 per deportee.
Administrations with more deportations have lower per-deportee costs due to economies of scale. If Trump really does plan on carrying out large-scale deportations, the costs for each person may be far lower than during his first administration.
These numbers also assume that the policies of sanctuary cities and states remain unchanged. Still, after Trump’s border czar Tom Homan threatened to put Denver Mayor Michael Johnston in jail after the mayor claimed he was willing to go to jail to protect the illegal aliens, Johnston appeared to backtrack on his promise. If sanctuary cities start assisting the federal government’s deportation efforts, the costs might also come down.
These conservative estimates are less than one-sixth to one-seventh the per deportee estimate of the AIC.
Another estimate AIC put out is a “one-time” cost of $316 billion to deport 13 million, which wasn’t reported by the media when they released their report in October. That comes to “at a minimum” $24,231 per deportee and shows the sensitivity of their estimates. But even that is roughly twice the estimate provided here.
In September, the Deputy Director for ICE noted that of the 7.4 million “non-detained” noncitizens with pending cases that were released into the United States, 662,566 have a criminal record. Our estimates indicate that it would cost about $8 billion to arrest and deport these criminals.
By contrast, if these illegal aliens commit a crime resembling the most serious crime that they have previously been convicted or charged with, the victimization costs amount to at least $166.5 billion. The National Institute of Justice estimated the costs to victims by including medical bills, lost wages, social/victim services, property loss/damage, police/fire service costs, and pain and suffering.
The costs of crime are roughly at least 21 times higher than deportation costs.
When the AIC cost estimates are six to seven times larger than the per deportee costs that we have actually observed over the last decade, you would hope people would be skeptical. Unfortunately, the news media was only too willing to uncritically repeat their claims.
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