Among former President Donald Trump’s campaign promises, one in particular stands out for his insistence on its importance and its potential impact: a pledge to conduct a “mass deportation” of immigrants shortly after he takes office. This proposal is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the American economy, affecting the labor market and the nation’s food supply.

Trump has made a number of false statements about immigration, incorrectly insisting that the number of migrants crossing the southern border was the result of foreign countries “emptying out” their prisons and mental institutions. He has also baselessly claimed that immigrants are usurping the potential jobs of Black and Hispanic Americans.

Last week, Trump outlined a plan to use an eighteenth-century law allowing the detention of and removal of “alien enemies” to carry out these deportations, although this would require declaring criminal entities such as drug cartels as foreign governments. But the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows for the removal of migrants in the face of “any invasion or predatory incursion” by a foreign government, echoes Trump’s own language characterizing the arrival of undocumented immigrants as an “invasion.”

Trump has suggested that undocumented migrants would be the principal targets of such sweeps, but his recent discussion of “remigration,” as well as his support for revoking temporary protected status for Haitian migrants, indicates that even legal U.S. residents could be caught in the crosshairs. But even if a future Trump administration followed through solely on the promise to deport unauthorized residents, the long-term effects would be significant.

The cost of such an operation would be enormous, said Nan Wu, research director at the American Immigration Council. A recent report by AIC estimated that a one-time deportation operation to evict the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022—along with the additional 2.3 million that crossed the southern border without legal status and were released by the Department of Homeland Security between January 2023 and April 2024—would cost at least $315 billion.

Given the large scale of such an operation, the report concluded, a one-time effort would be logistically unfeasible. But a lengthier process would be even more costly: A decade-long operation to deport one million people annually would cost roughly $88 billion per year, with the majority of that cost dedicated to building detention centers, the report concluded. After the deportation, the long-term impacts would be significant, the AIC found, in part because local, state, and federal governments would be deprived of billions of dollars of tax revenue and contributions........

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