Cost of deporting 1 immigrant: Almost $11,000
Additional funds would cover just 5% of Trump’s goals
President Trump promised during the campaign to deport all 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. but has since narrowed his focus to im- migrants with criminal histories, a number many analysts put at about 2 million.
The president, in his revised budget appropriations for fiscal year 2017, asked Congress for an additional $1.15 billion for ICE to detain, transport and remove undocumented immigrants from the United States. He also asked for $76 million to begin recruiting and hiring about 10,000 enforcement agents.
How far would that get Trump toward deporting 2 million immigrants?
Based on current estimates, the additional money could get Trump about 5% of the way to his goal.
There’s nothing hard and fast about such estimates. The location, length of detention, country of origin and other factors can significantly add or subtract from the price tag, as some deportations show.
Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia
and Jose Escobar visited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices recently for routine appointments.
Both expected to return home afterward to their families in Phoenix and Houston, respectively. Instead, they were detained and deported on the same day, becoming among the first high-profile removals in the wake of President Trump’s executive actions on immigration enforcement.
In the case of Fomperosa, his deportation from metro Phoenix involved an overnight stay in detention and a two-hour van ride to his native Mexico. Escobar, meanwhile, spent two weeks in detention in Texas, at an average cost of $180 a day, before being escorted onto a charter flight to El Salvador.
“This (effort to increase deportations) is a major, major task ... and would require a large investment in immigration enforcement,” said Ben Gigis, director of Labor Market Policy at the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.
ICE spent an average of $10,854 per deportee during the fiscal year that ended in September, according to ICE spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe. “This includes all costs necessary to identify, apprehend, detain, process through immigration court, and remove an alien,” she said in an interview. Pitts O’Keefe told The Arizona
Republic that she was not authorized to provide the methodology used to calculate that number, indicating a public records request would be required. The Republic is pursuing that information.
That figure was a slight decrease from 2011, when Kumar Kibble, deputy director of ICE under former DHS Secretary and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement. He told lawmakers it cost ICE “approximately $12,500 to arrest, detain and remove an individual from the United States.”
Based on the government’s most recent estimate, Trump’s budget request would cover the cost of deporting nearly 106,000 more people this year. And the supplemental funds he has requested for ICE next year would cover deporting an additional 138,000 undocumented immigrants.
Those dollars would be spread across the entire deportation process: apprehension, detention, court proceedings and removal.
In 2015, Gigis conducted a study using data from the government’s budget to estimate the costs of deporting all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. The study assumes that about 20% of the estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States would leave voluntarily.
The federal government spends on average $4,800 to apprehend an individual, according to his study. That’s because ICE relies heavily on local and state agencies to hold unauthorized immigrants who’ve been arrested for other violations, Gigis said.
That practice has come under scrutiny by “sanctuary cities and counties” that refuse to cooperate with ICE.
If ICE is forced to go at it alone, costs could rise to as much as $27,000 per person, the study concluded.
“These apprehension personnel, they have to investigate,” Gigis said. “A lot of undocumented immigrants have been here for decades and are well-integrated into their communities, so I think it would take quite an investigative effort.”
DETENTION Detention is by far the costliest part of deporting an undocumented immigrant, said David Bier, an immigration policy analyst with the libertarian CATO Institute.
“You have to pay to monitor them around the clock, you have to pay to feed them every single day, you have to tend to their other needs, health and so forth,” he said. “So it’s an extremely expensive project to detain everybody they arrest.”
It costs on average about $180 a day to detain an individual, and the average length of detention is about 30 days, according to the government’s most recent data. Based on those figures, an average immigration detention costs $5,400.
“The only thing that comes close is the costs of actually hiring the agents to do the arrests,” Bier said.
Federal law requires ICE to keep all of its 34,000 detention beds full. Trump’s executive order calls for increased detention space on the U.S.-Mexico border.
COURT PROCEEDINGS Since October, U.S. immigration courts have handled more than 47,500 deportation proceedings, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks immigration data.
Estimates from the American Action Fund study put the average cost to legally process unauthorized immigrants at $1,495 per person. But not all unauthorized immigrants get the chance to argue their case in courts.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in remarks near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, addressed one of the biggest obstacles to deportation: a massive backlog of pending immigration court cases. It stands at more than 542,000 cases, with the average wait time up to 677 days, according to TRAC.
TRANSPORTATION U.S. authorities deported more than 200,000 people to Mexico using chartered buses to drop off deportees at one of 11 cities on the Mexican side of the border.
The agency manages ICE Air Operations, with headquarters in Mesa, to transport detainees by charter flights. Unauthorized immigrants caught in the interior of the country are flown to detention centers and then to their countries of origin, other than Mexico.
A 2015 review by the Office of the Inspector General found nearly half of all flights each year under ICE Air Operations were for transportation within the United States. A quarter of the flights were from the U.S. to Central America’s restive Northern Triangle: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The remaining destinations were spread out across South America, the Caribbean and other corners of the globe.
ICE said the removal costs in 2016 averaged $1,978 per person, but it didn’t provide a further breakdown of the expenses.
BEYOND DEPORTATION Whatever the cost of deporting undocumented immigrants, it’s a bargain compared with letting them stay in the U.S., said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. The center is a research organization that favors less overall immigration and more immigration enforcement.
According to his calculations, unskilled undocumented immigrants use $74,722 more in public services than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes.
“The bottom line is if the costs are around $10,000 to deport someone … then it looks like a good deal for taxpayers,” he said.