Immigration > Illegal Immigration

DHS Says It Costs $18,000 To Deport An Illegal Alien

It’s criminal that taxpayers must foot that bill, but it’s worth every penny.

Vince Coyner | April 18, 2026

I saw a video yesterday of Markwayne Mullin, the new DHS Secretary, appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show. He stated that it costs more than $18,000 per deportee to remove an illegal from the United States. If you’re thinking that’s because we’re giving them swag bags and first-class tickets home, you’d be wrong. At least that would be fast. No, the $18,000 is what it costs to navigate an illegal through the justice system because activist “judges” make the government jump through a labyrinth of laws and hoops.

Mullins encourages us to imagine the cost of doing that to the twenty million illegals allowed in during the Biden administration. That would be $360 billion! And there would still be another 30 million illegals in the country.

All of this reminded me of a conversation I was having with a young person recently about the cost of illegals to the country. In this case, we were talking about housing. I mentioned that one of the reasons that housing was so expensive is that there are 50 million illegals in the United States. Despite California’s insane Homeless Industrial Complex, most of them are not living on the streets, in California, or anywhere else. They are living in homes.

The population of the United States is approximately 350 million people, who live in approximately 148 million housing units. That is an average of 2.4 people per house or apartment (collectively, “residences”).

Immigrants typically have more people living in their homes—3.5 people per residence. Using that number, the 50 million illegal aliens in the United States live in 14 million residences. If those 50 million illegals were not here, the housing stock available for American citizens and other legal residents would increase by almost 10%. To put that in perspective, on average, the net number of new residences to hit the market each year is about 1.5........

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