Spending hundreds of billions on mass deportation for non-violent civil offenses or misdemeanors is the “war on drugs” rebranded. And it’s true—just like the war on drugs, mass deportation doesn’t solve the root causes of anything. It scapegoats vulnerable people, militarizes our communities, and funnels public money into private hands—while pretending to serve justice.
Let’s get specific.
1. Immigration violations are civil, not criminal.
Roughly half of undocumented immigrants came here legally and overstayed their visas. That’s a civil offense—not a crime.23 The idea that we need to militarize ICE and spend tens of billions a year to round up, jail and deport millions of nonviolent people for a civil infraction? That’s not about law and order. It’s about using state power to punish the poor and profit from the prison/deportation pipeline.
2. Crossing the border without papers is a misdemeanor—not a felony.
Unauthorized entry is a federal misdemeanor, not a felony.2 So unless we’re ready to spend hundreds of billions rounding up every jaywalker, litterer and pot smoker in the country, there’s no justification for a sprawling, militarized deportation machine targeting people for one of the more petty non-violent infractions. Serious crimes like assault, theft, trafficking, and fraud are still crimes. Our tax dollars should go toward stopping real threats—not wasted on jailing people for crossing a border, overstaying a visa, or working without papers.
3. Like the War on Drugs, it’s a profit machine.
Just as the drug war built a prison-industrial complex, immigration enforcement props up a deportation-industrial complex. Private detention giants like CoreCivic and GEO Group rake in massive profits through ICE contracts—GEO made $1.05 billion and CoreCivic $552 million from ICE in 2022 alone—and lobby for harsher immigration laws to keep the profits flowing.5 This isn’t about safety. It’s about turning suffering into stock dividends.
4. It’s wildly expensive and strategically useless.
Mass deportation would cost at least $315 billion for a one-time operation, and annual costs could reach $88 billion to deport one million people per year, with a total cost estimated at over $967.9 billion over a decade to deport all 13 million undocumented immigrants.17 For what? To rip millions from their homes, destroy families, and crash labor markets in industries that depend on immigrant workers. This isn’t just cruel—it’s colossally wasteful.
Just to emphasize how insane this would be, we need to look closer at these numbers, estimated by American Immigration Council:
We wish to emphasize that [$315 billion] is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time—incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible. For one thing, there would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step. To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people.
In order to estimate the costs of a longer-term mass deportation operation, we calculated the cost of a program aiming to arrest, detain, process, and deport one million people per year—paralleling the more conservative proposals made by mass-deportation proponents. Even assuming that 20 percent of the undocumented population would “self-deport” under a yearslong mass-deportation regime, we estimate the ultimate cost of such a longer operation would average out to $88 billion annually, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade. This is a much higher sum than the one-time estimate, given the long-term costs of establishing and maintaining detention facilities and temporary camps to eventually be able to detain one million people at a time—costs that could not be modeled in a short-term analysis. This would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists. The government would also be required to establish and maintain over 1,000 new immigration courtrooms to process people at such a rate.
Even this estimate is likely quite conservative, as we were unable to estimate the additional hiring costs for the tens of thousands of agents needed to carry out one million arrests per year, the additional capital investments necessary to increase the ICE Air Operations fleet of charter aircraft to carry out one million annual deportations, and a myriad of other ancillary costs necessary to ramp up federal immigration enforcement operations to the scale necessary.
5. Immigrants contribute more than they take.
In 2024, new data showed that immigrants—both legal and undocumented—pay billions in taxes and help keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent, even though undocumented immigrants can’t collect those benefits.6 Immigrants are not a drain—they’re a backbone of the economy.
Again, to quote the American Immigration Council:
"Beyond the direct financial cost of mass deportation, we also estimated the impact on the U.S. economy. Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, we found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It would also result in significant reduction in tax revenues for the U.S. government. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.
Mass deportations would cause significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector. We estimate that nearly 14 percent of people employed in the construction industry are undocumented. Removing that labor would disrupt all forms of construction across the nation, from homes to businesses to basic infrastructure. As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs."
6. Immigrants commit less crime than U.S. citizens.
Multiple studies, including those tracking Texas arrest data, show that immigrants—both documented and undocumented—are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.2 So if this is about crime, we’re wasting billions targeting the wrong people.
7. Due process is being shredded—just look at El Salvador.
In some cases, U.S. deportation policy has resulted in people being sent directly from U.S. immigration detention into indefinite imprisonment at El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, notorious for rampant human rights abuses. Since March 2025, the U.S. has deported hundreds of people—primarily Venezuelan migrants and some Salvadorans—straight to CECOT. Most of these deportees had no criminal record in the United States; families and advocates confirm that many were detained based on alleged associations or superficial “gang identifiers” like tattoos or clothing, not on evidence of criminal activity.891011
Once in El Salvador, these individuals are held incommunicado, denied contact with lawyers or family, and placed in overcrowded, harsh conditions without trial or formal charges. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented these detentions as enforced disappearances and arbitrary imprisonment, amounting to grave violations of international law.3467 This is what happens when due process is discarded in favor of authoritarian “security” policy: people are disappeared into a legal black hole, their rights erased by a system designed for punishment, not justice.46
8. It’s rooted in the same logic as the drug war:
Punish rather than heal. Fear rather than reason. Instead of addressing why people come here—violence, poverty, failed U.S. trade deals, climate chaos—we criminalize survival itself. Just like we once jailed addicts instead of building a sane public health system, we now jail asylum seekers instead of fixing the system that forces migration in the first place.
9. It disproportionately targets people of color.
Immigration enforcement disproportionately impacts Latino and Black immigrants, who are more likely to be stopped, detained, and deported—even when facing the same charges as white immigrants. It’s the same racialized policing logic that packed prisons with Black and brown bodies for drug offenses. Different war, same agenda.
Mass deportation isn’t a policy—it’s a racket. It doesn’t help our economy. It doesn’t uphold justice. It turns human suffering into a profit stream, cloaked in the language of law and order.
So yes, this is the War on Drugs 2.0—wasteful, corrupt, and dehumanizing.
It enriches contractors. It militarizes the state. It shatters lives.
And just like the last war, it doesn’t make us safer. It just makes cruelty profitable.
What We Can Do Instead
Instead of spending hundreds of billions to criminalize nonviolent migration, we can redirect that energy—and funding—toward real safety, real justice, and real solutions.
1. Deprioritize low-level immigration enforcement.
Police chiefs have the authority to shift departmental priorities. By deprioritizing enforcement against nonviolent migrants—especially those engaged in work, family life, and community contributions—we can save millions in wasted enforcement and detention costs.
That money could be redirected to prosecute actual crimes: assault, trafficking, domestic violence, wage theft, corporate fraud, environmental abuse—the things that truly threaten public safety and human wellbeing.
2. Push for sanctuary policies at the local level.
City governments and police departments can adopt sanctuary policies that prevent officers from acting as de facto immigration agents. These policies often prohibit asking about immigration status and refuse collaboration with ICE unless a serious or violent felony is involved.
This protects families, builds trust between police and immigrant communities, and stops local budgets from being used to subsidize federal deportation policy.
3. Refuse collaboration with ICE.
Police departments are not legally required to comply with ICE detainers. These detainers are requests, not orders—and federal courts have ruled that detaining someone solely on this basis can violate the Fourth Amendment. Departments can choose to stop holding people for ICE unless there’s a valid judicial warrant.
4. Implement “Don’t Ask” policies.
Local police can adopt rules that prohibit officers from inquiring about immigration status, especially during routine stops or investigations. This policy alone has been shown to increase cooperation from immigrant communities, improve crime reporting, and reduce fear-based silence—especially for survivors of domestic abuse or trafficking.
5. Withdraw from 287(g) agreements.
Police departments that have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE—agreements that deputize local officers to carry out immigration enforcement—can terminate those contracts. This requires approval at the local or county level but can be a powerful step in disentangling policing from the deportation machine. Over 40 jurisdictions have ended 287(g) since 2017, and the list continues to grow.
6. Pressure city councils and mayors to cut ICE contracts.
Many cities and counties have agreements with ICE to house detainees in local jails. These contracts are lucrative, but immoral. Communities can organize to terminate these contracts, forcing cities to stop profiting from immigrant incarceration and instead invest in housing, healthcare, education, and real public safety.
7. Pass state-level “anti-collaboration” laws.
State legislators can introduce and pass laws that restrict or ban cooperation with ICE across all local and state agencies. California’s SB 54 is a model—it turned the entire state into a “sanctuary state,” significantly limiting law enforcement collaboration with federal immigration enforcement.
8. Support legal defense funds and community bailouts.
Immigrants in detention often face deportation without legal representation. Cities and communities can create publicly funded legal defense programs to ensure due process, fight wrongful deportations, and prevent families from being separated simply because they couldn’t afford a lawyer.
9. On a policy level, we can fight for laws that:
- Provide a clear and accessible path to citizenship
- Expand the availability of work permits
- Protect the right to organize and join labor unions, regardless of immigration status
- Ensure fair wages and workplace protections for all workers
- Don't waste billions on mass deporting non-violent, working-class people, instead using those funds to catch and prosecute real criminals and invest in community
In short:
We don’t have to accept mass deportation as the default.
We can fight for policies that treat migration as a human reality, not a criminal act.
We can redirect our budgets toward justice—not punishment.
And we can build communities where all people, regardless of status, are treated with dignity.
Let’s stop repeating the mistakes of the War on Drugs.
Let’s dismantle the War on Immigrants before it scars another generation.
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