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Mass deportation would come with hefty bill, require more manpower, immigration experts say
The mass deportation plan former President Donald Trump has pledged to institute if he’s reelected would come with a hefty price tag.
The American Immigration Council estimated that it could cost $88 billion annually to deport one million people a year. The removal of millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion.
Tom Homan, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, said he doesn’t know if the $88 billion a year cost estimate is accurate, but he says mass deportation is necessary.
“What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?” Homan said.
How deportations work now
60 Minutes recently joined ICE officers in Silver Spring, Maryland, as they located and arrested undocumented immigrants with criminal histories, including assault, robbery, drug and gun convictions. They’d been identified by ICE as threats to public safety.
They stopped a van and arrested the passenger, a 24-year-old Guatemalan with an assault conviction, who had been ordered deported by a judge five years ago. ICE officers said the driver of the van was also in the country illegally and had been deported once before, but he was let go. Matt Elliston, director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, said the driver didn’t have a criminal record.
“He was picking up his employee to go to work,” Elliston said. “It doesn’t make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that when we have other felons to go out and get today.”
Elliston said ICE’s mission is targeted enforcement — using immigration law to improve public safety.
“It’s not to just aimlessly arrest anyone we come across,” he said.
It took a team of more than a dozen officers seven hours to arrest six people, and that doesn’t include the many hours spent searching for them.
Are there resources to support mass deportation?
There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States — about 3% of the population — and Trump has vowed to launch the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. Homan, who Trump has said would join him if he wins a second term, said he’s unaware of any written mass deportation plan.
“ICE is very good at these operations. This is what they do,” Homan said.
But Elliston doesn’t know how, in Maryland, the agency could find the resources for mass deportation.
“Just the amount of money that that would cost in order to detain everybody, you know, it [would be] at the Department of Defense level of financing,” he said.
Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff during the first two years of the Biden administration, said it costs $150 a night to detain people like those 60 Minutes saw arrested. The average stay as they await deportation is 46 days. One deportation flight can cost $250,000, and that assumes the home country will accept them. Many, like Cuba and Venezuela, rarely do.
Who would handle mass deportation?
ICE currently has around 6,000 law enforcement officers in its deportation branch. It would require a massive increase in manpower to arrest and deport a million people a year, Houser said.
“You’re talking 100,000 official officers, police officers, detention officers, support staff, management staff,” he said.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said staff could come from other government agencies, like the Drug Enforcement Administration, but Houser criticized the idea of taking people from other agencies outside ICE off their set missions.
Immigration enforcement also requires specialized training and language skills that most military and law enforcement officers don’t have.
“It is not an easy swap,” Elliston said. “What I can tell you in, from the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration law is second to the U.S. tax code in complexity.”
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10/27: The Takeout: Chris Moody and David Becker
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McDonald’s beef patties test negative for E. coli in Colorado, Department of Agriculture says
Colorado has seemingly eliminated one ingredient as a cause for death and illness, as states continue to investigate the source of an E. coli outbreak involving the Quarter Pounder hamburger at dozens of McDonald’s locations. As a result, the Quarter Pounder will begin to return to certain locations.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture announced McDonald’s brand “fresh and frozen beef patties” tested negative for E. coli after its lab analyzed dozens of subsamples.
CDA says it has completed all beef testing and does not anticipate receiving further samples.
Meanwhile, the federal investigation into the deadly E. coli outbreak in Colorado has focused on ground beef patties and onions. There continues to be no evidence that onions grown in Colorado are linked to the outbreak.
According to McDonald’s, The 900 restaurants that historically received slivered onions from Taylor Farms’ Colorado Springs facility will resume sales of Quarter Pounders without slivered onions. Those restaurants are in Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming, as well as portions of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah. The restaurant chain also noted it has stopped getting onions from that facility indefinitely.
“The issue appears to be contained to a particular ingredient and geography, and we remain very confident that any contaminated product related to this outbreak has been removed from our supply chain and is out of all McDonald’s restaurants,” McDonald’s North American Chief Supply Chain Officer Cesar Piña said in a statement Sunday
Since the outbreak was first announced, CBS News Colorado confirmed one older man on the Western Slope died after consuming a Quarter Pounder from a McDonald’s location in the state. Initial information also confirmed more than two dozen people had become ill due to E. coli-affected Quarter Pounders.
Nationwide, this outbreak has sickened 75 people in more than a dozen states, but Colorado remains the only state impacted that has experienced a death due to it.
The Colorado Department of Public Health says there have been 26 cases reported in nine different Colorado counties, and they are located in several different parts of the state:
- Arapahoe County
- Chaffee County
- El Paso County
- Gunnison County
- Larimer County
- Mesa County
- Routt County
- Teller County
- Weld County
The illnesses were reported between the last days of September and through Oct. 11. An investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the outbreak is ongoing.
McDonald’s company leaders previously said they’ve taken Quarter Pounders off the menu in states where there have been outbreaks.
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“CBS Weekend News” headlines for Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024
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