The Staggering Opportunity Cost of Mass Deportation: Radical Shift of Federal Money, Manpower Away from Real Security Threats

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Washington, DC — America’s Voice continues to ask, “At what cost” to America is the Trump administration willing to go to advance its mass deportation agenda? Specifically, as Americans recoil from seeing the detentions and deportations of long-residing workers, parents and spouses of U.S. citizens, the costs go beyond just the real human and economic toll of the mass deportation dragnet to also include the opportunity cost of diverting federal law enforcement and investigative resources and manpower away from actual public safety threats and toward the mass deportation effort.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“The Trump administration is making America less safe with a radical shift in federal law enforcement money and manpower away from security and public safety and to fuel its obsession with mass deportation and targeting long-settled parents, students, and hard-working community members. As a result, the cost to American taxpayers and the safety of our people is mounting – and these misplaced priorities are set to become all the more acute and harmful to Americans’ safety and health if Republicans and the Trump administration’s extreme budget moves forward intact.”

New reporting underscores the extent to which the Trump administration is tasking federal agents with joining the mass deportation effort – at direct cost to crucial public safety and active investigations.

●     The New York Times, “Trump Aims to Use More F.B.I., Drug and Gun Agents to Pursue Immigrants,” notes: “Justice Department officials have decided that about 2,000 of their federal agents — from the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service — will be enlisted to help the Department of Homeland Security find and arrest undocumented immigrants for the remainder of the year … Diverting Justice Department resources to focus solely on immigration also raises questions about whether such a change would affect other priorities, like investigating financial crimes or corruption.”

●     Reuters, “FBI ordered to prioritize immigration, as DOJ scales back white collar cases,” notes: “FBI agents were told by their field offices they would need to start devoting about one third of their time to helping the Trump administration crack down on illegal immigration … Immigration enforcement has largely not been the purview of the Justice Department’s law enforcement agencies in the past.” An earlier Reuters story highlighted, “thousands of federal law enforcement officials from multiple agencies are being enlisted to take on new work as immigration enforcers, pulling crime-fighting resources away … from drug trafficking and terrorism to sexual abuse and fraud.”

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council assessed: “Trump has so far shifted at least 80% of the ATF, 33% of the FBI, 25% of the DEA, plus ‘scores’ of ICE HSI agents investigating pedophiles and an unknown number of agents from the IRS, USPIS, and CBP to do immigration enforcement — leaving their previous work undone or suspended.”

Meanwhile we see daily reminders about who the mass deportation dragnet is targeting – not public safety threats, but long-residing immigrants with deep roots and ties to this nation – and the cruel way the mass deportation dragnet is unfolding. See NBC Boston, “Immigration agents break SUV window while detaining man after church on Mother’s Day,” noting, “The man who recorded the footage told Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra that he heard the mother screaming, “He has his papers, he has his license!”

Keep in mind that the Trump administration and their allies in Congress are proposing a budget that would turbocharge this type of deportation overreach, cruelty and chaos (including boosting the ICE enforcement budget tenfold, while slashing essential government programs such as Medicaid and SNAP).