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How much did DHS spend in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles?

(NewsNation) — The cost to send federal immigration agents and officers to “sanctuary cities” is hard to pin down, and ranges from $18 million a week in Minneapolis to $59 million over two months in Chicago.

And it all depends on who you ask.

More than $409 billion in federal funding was devoted to immigration enforcement over more than two decades since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created, but the amount first calculated by the American Immigration Council in 2024 has jumped by hundreds of millions since President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration began last year.

Accurately calculating the cost of surging federal immigration officers and agents to urban areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and most recently, Minneapolis, is not an exact science.

Elected officials, nonprofit organizations and media outlets are left to create mathematical formulas based on government costs for agent compensation, lodging and food to predict how much American taxpayers are paying for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to move agents and officers into cities to carry out the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission.

This comes as lawmakers are at an impasse over funding the department as Democrats demand ICE and CBP reforms.

Adding to the mathematical difficulty is a lack of transparency from DHS, Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, told NewsNation. While the federal agency has a budgeted amount in place, the creation of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” infused $170 billion into the agency’s coffers, giving DHS what Gupta equates to a “slush fund” to pull from.

The mega-funding bill ear-marked $30 billion for immigration enforcement and another $45 billion for detention in ICE facilities over the next three years. But in addition to the DHS funding that covers government per diems for operational funding, Gupta said the bill also allows the agency to operate behind a wall of secrecy.

“(DHS officials) are just pulling dollars from (that bill) as they do these surges, and we can’t really know exactly how........

© The Hill