The Costs of Mass Deportation Are Soaring: Harming America’s Economy, Public Safety, and Constitutional Rights

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Washington, DC — The devastating cost and dire consequences of President Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation obsession continues to be on display across the nation, affecting all Americans. New reporting highlights the economic costs of raids that are overwhelming nursing home care, agricultural and construction workers and threatening regional economies; the public safety costs of the obsessive focus on immigration enforcement above real threats, including terrorism; and the human and moral cost to our nation – from the outrageous story of the father of three Marines being beaten and abducted by ICE to the horrific story of a pregnant mother delivering a stillborn baby while in detention.

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

“Make no mistake: the Trump/Miller campaign against immigrants is bringing real harm to every American. Their obsession is harming American industries, risking the safety of citizens and communities, and destroying the lives of our neighbors, friends, and families. For them, cruelty is the point, chaos is a bonus. And now they want to turbocharge those harms by massively expanding ICE funding in the big, ugly bill. At what cost to Americans’ safety, prosperity and families will the Trump administration continue their reckless and harmful mass deportation agenda?”

See below for key stories grouped into the types of costs and consequences on display:

Economic Costs

• The Washington Post, “Local economies under pressure as ICE crackdowns create climate of fear,” including: “From California grocery stores to chicken chains in suburban D.C., businesses that serve large immigrant populations are reporting shifts in consumer behavior — fewer in-store visits, lower receipts and more delivery orders — that threaten to drag down local economies, according to interviews with business owners, as well as spending data.”

• Syracuse Post-Standard editorial, “Crackdown on migrant farm labor a moral and policy failure,” including: “As the federal crackdown on immigration expands to farm fields and meat packing plants, the crippling effects on these businesses and your pocketbooks are just beginning.”

• KFF Health News, “Dual Threats From Trump and GOP Imperil Nursing Homes and Their Foreign-Born Workers” including: “Existing staffing shortages and quality-of-care problems would be compounded by other policies pushed by Trump and the Republican-led Congress, according to nursing home officials, resident advocates, and academic experts.”
• Associated Press, “A look at how Trump’s big bill could change the US immigration system,” noting: “President Donald Trump’s spending cuts and border security package would inject roughly $150 billion into his mass deportation agenda over the next four years, funding everything from an extension of the United States’ southern border wall to detention centers to thousands of additional law enforcement staff.”

Public Safety Costs

• San Francisco Chronicle, “Exclusive: Nearly one-third of National Guard drug enforcement team were pulled to go to L.A.,” including: “Nearly a third of the California National Guard troops who had been doing drug enforcement work have been pulled away as part of President Donald Trump’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles. Of the 447 National Guard members on the Counterdrug Task Force, 142 have been pulled off of the assignment as part of the Los Angeles deployment, according to data from the California National Guard.”

• Boston Globe, “Threat of Iranian retaliation sparks questions about US terrorism readiness amid Trump immigration crackdown,” including: “…Trump has refocused the priorities that have dominated Washington since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, including by dramatically shifting federal resources toward achieving his goals on immigration and border security.”
• The Bulwark, “Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Making Us More Vulnerable to Domestic Terrorism,” including: “The collective law-enforcement of this country, from the federal to the local level, only has so much money and so many people. As the president orders the federal agencies to focus on deporting cooks, truck drivers, and farm hands—and encourages state and municipal agencies to help—resources and attention shift away from the most dangerous criminals.”

Moral Costs and Human Toll

• Nashville Banner, “ICE Arrested a Pregnant Tennessee Woman — While in Detention in Louisiana, She had a Stillbirth” including: ““I [Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus] told them to just send me back to Guatemala because I was pregnant and wasn’t getting the medical attention I needed,” she said. “I called Immigration, ICE, I called and sent texts, but still, nothing. They told me I had to wait for my flight. Can you imagine?””

• NBC News, “Marine veteran defends gardener father seen being hit by immigration agents in video,” including: “The Marine veteran son of a California gardener seen in a graphic video being repeatedly struck on the head by a masked Customs and Border Patrol agent and chased at gunpoint is pushing back against government statements that his father attacked agents with a weed trimmer. Narciso’s son Alejandro Barranco, 25, a Marine veteran, told MSNBC on Tuesday that had he treated a detainee the same way while he was serving as a Marine, “it would have been a war crime.”

• Newsweek, “Green Card Holder For 58 Years Faces Deportation,” including: “Victor Avila, a 66-year-old long-term U.S. green card holder who legally immigrated in 1967 and has held a green card since, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a GoFundMe. Avila was returning home visiting his son who is a member of the U.S. Airforce when he was detained.”

• The Guardian, “‘Handcuffed like we’re criminals’: Ohio teen soccer star recounts deportation,” including: “The Ohio high school graduate and soccer standout who was recently deported from the US to Honduras despite having no arrest record has described being “handcuffed like we’re some big criminals” for the entirety of his deportation flight.”

• NBC News, “Dreamer who spent 15 days in ICE detention says she was ‘scared and felt alone’,” including: “Scared, alone and heartbroken: that’s how 19-year-old Caroline Dias Goncalves said she felt the two weeks she spent in a detention center in Colorado after immigration authorities arrested her following a traffic stop.”