Tom Homan Demands $86 BILLION Down Payment For Deportations

[Ford_Prefect]

7. Wasn't there an estimate by the GAO or someone else that removing foreign workers as proposed will cost wayyyyyy more?

That is the cost of collecting and deporting them, plus the impact it will have on agriculture and other production, along with lost local , state and federal income taxes and social security payments. Which is to say nothing of the effect the on the U.S. economy losing their collective and individual spending on goods and services.

What has Mr. "Poisoning the Blood" have to say about that figure?

Back in 2015 one source put it this way:

Depending on how the government conducts its apprehensions, it would need to spend $100 billion to $300 billion arresting and removing all undocumented immigrants residing in the country, a process that we estimate would take 20 years. In addition, to prevent any new undocumented immigrants going forward, the government would at a minimum have to maintain current immigration enforcement levels. This results in an additional $315 billion in continuing enforcement costs over that time period.

Not only would enforcing current law cost taxpayers, it would also burden the economy. Removing all undocumented immigrants would cause the labor force to shrink by 6.4 percent, which translates to a loss of 11 million workers. As a result, 20 years from now the economy would be nearly 6 percent or $1.6 trillion smaller than it would be if the government did not remove all undocumented immigrants. While this impact would be found throughout the economy, the agriculture, construction, retail and hospitality sectors would be especially strongly affected.

https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-budgetary-and-economic-costs-of-addressing-unauthorized-immigration-alt/

I strongly suspect it will cost far more in 2025 money. That might influence a few elections, no?

A more contemporary source paints an even more complicated, expensive, and dire picture: https://immigrationimpact.com/2024/10/02/report-costs-mass-deportation-immigration/

The report from the American Immigration Council finds that an effort to arrest, detain, process, and remove one million undocumented immigrants per year would cost the U.S. government at least $88 billion per year, ultimately adding up to nearly one trillion dollars in taxpayer costs.

Beyond fiscal costs, the report details how the U.S. economy would suffer if 4% of the workforce was deported. U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would drop anywhere from 4.2% to 6.8%. By comparison, the U.S. GDP shrank by 4.3% during the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009.

While some politicians treat mass deportations as a simple operation, the report breaks down the process and explains how ramping up each aspect — from arrest, to detention, to processing, to removal — would require an enormous infusion of resources and personnel at extreme costs. The costs of even a single year of a million-deportation regime would be enough to cover nearly twice the annual budget of the National Institute for Health and 18 times more than the entire world currently spends on cancer research each year.

To find and arrest a population of over 13.3 undocumented immigrants would require the government to mobilize anywhere from 212,000 to 409,000 new government employees and law enforcement officers. Even an operation to carry out one million arrests per year would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire at least 31,000 new employees at an annual cost of at least $6.2 billion per year, nearly as much as ICE’s entire current budget. These estimates are likely conservative, as they don’t account for any of the additional human resources costs, technology costs, legal costs, and other secondary costs which would be incurred by a strategy of mass hiring followed by mass apprehensions in communities.

I have the feeling that the emphasis on this horrible and outrageously expensive pogrom is more by the way of using the alleged emergency to fund new agencies by stealing the money from other established programs, as well as providing a "national emergency" excuse for 45 to bypass Congress, the Constitution, federal and state laws.