American Workers Are Paying the Price for ICE’s Enforcement Surge

When President Donald Trump campaigned on mass deportations ahead of his second term, the central sales pitch was straightforward: remove undocumented immigrants and free up jobs for American workers.

He followed through on that promise with a speed and scale that few anticipated. Between Jan. 1 and mid-June 2025 alone, more than 105,000 people were deported, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) focusing initial operations on predominantly Democratic-run cities before broadening its reach across the country.

The administration framed the crackdown as an economic lifeline for native-born workers, with Trump repeatedly arguing that immigrants were taking jobs that rightfully belonged to Americans, specifically referencing what he called “Hispanic” and “Black jobs.”

It was a narrative that resonated with a significant portion of his voter base and helped carry him back into the White House. But new data from one of the country’s most respected policy institutions tells a very different story, and the numbers are jarring enough to make even the most committed supporters pause.

A study published by the Brookings Institution has found that, rather than creating opportunities for American workers, ICE enforcement operations have cost the U.S. economy 668,000 jobs, affecting both U.S.-born and foreign-born workers.

For every single ICE arrest made in the cities most heavily targeted by enforcement activities, roughly 30 jobs were lost across the surrounding economy. That is not a typo. Thirty jobs gone for every one person detained.

The Numbers Behind the Job Losses

Brookings researchers focused their analysis on 86 cities that recorded the highest levels of ICE activity between January and June 2025, during which approximately 52,000 people were arrested. The data revealed a consistent and troubling pattern: employment in these cities declined sharply as ICE operations intensified, and the losses grew over time rather than leveling off.

In the top quarter of cities with the most intense enforcement, including Houston, San Diego, and Knoxville, Tennessee, employment fell by an average of 0.73%. In cities where researchers had at least 6 months of pre-surge employment data for comparison, that figure jumped to 1.48%, compared with cities that did not experience a similar enforcement spike.

The researchers studied employment trends through September 2025 and projected that the declines would continue to deepen in subsequent months.

The scale of what happened in some individual cities was particularly striking. Laredo, a border city in Texas, went from an average of six ICE arrests per month to 803 arrests per month once operations ramped up. Nationally,ICE street arrests increased elevenfold during the first year of Trump’s second administration, according to data compiled by the Deportation Data Project.

Why American Workers Felt the Shock

The study’s most counterintuitive finding, at least for those who believed the administration’s premise, is that a significant share of the 668,000 jobs lost were held by workers born in the United States. Brookings researchers estimated that between 51,000 and 297,000 of those positions were held by American citizens who suddenly found themselves without work, not because they were arrested, but because the businesses that employed them collapsed or scaled back operations.

The reason comes down to how labor markets in industries like construction, hospitality, and food service actually function. These sectors employ large numbers of immigrant workers, and their roles are often structurally interdependent with those of U.S.-born workers.

A construction crew made up largely of immigrant laborers does not exist in a vacuum; their work directly enables project managers, electricians, and building inspectors to do theirs. When those laborers disappear, the entire job chain behind them unravels.

“Many businesses just can’t easily replace the missing workers,” said Marcela Escobari, vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings, who co-authored the study. “Recruiting and training new employees can take time, and so many businesses start scaling back, or even shut down, creating a ripple effect that costs even more jobs.”

Her co-author Ian Seyal also flagged a longer-term risk, warning that construction slowdowns tied to enforcement activity could push both goods and home prices higher.

Fear Drove the Economy Underground

Beyond the direct job losses, Brookings researchers documented something harder to quantify but arguably just as damaging: a widespread chilling effect on local economic activity driven by fear. News coverage of ICE operations, which included worksite raids, home arrests, and the detention of legal residents and even U.S. citizens, caused many people who had no direct contact with immigration enforcement to withdraw from public life entirely.

A separate study from the University of Pennsylvania, drawing on cell phone and credit card data, found that ICE activity caused measurable declines in foot traffic and consumer spending in targeted areas.

People stopped going to restaurants. They avoided shopping centers. They stayed home. And when consumers disappear, businesses that serve them, including ones with no immigrant workforce at all, begin to lose revenue and shed workers of their own.

Arts and entertainment venues, for instance, reported job losses not because their staff was arrested, but because their audiences stopped showing up.

Escobari was direct about the cause. “Given the widespread fear that these surges engendered, they caused many people who didn’t have any contact with ICE to stop going out, to spend less money, and this suppressed demand for goods and services, which also cost jobs,” she explained.

This fear-driven demand suppression, as the researchers termed it, meant that the economic damage of ICE operations extended far beyond any sector with a significant immigrant workforce.

A Policy Producing the Opposite of Its Promise

The Brookings findings do not stand alone. A University of Colorado Boulder study published earlier this year found that for every six undocumented male workers arrested, one male U.S.-born worker left the workforce entirely. Taken together, the accumulating body of research paints a picture that directly contradicts the administration’s stated economic rationale for the crackdown.

Escobari’s team was notably confident in their ability to isolate the ICE variable from other economic pressures simultaneously bearing down on the country. “If it had been tariffs, or AI, or the war, or all of those things affecting all cities, we would not have seen such a sharp divergence between surge and non-surge cities at exactly the moment enforcement surged,” she said. The pattern was too precise and too consistent to attribute to anything else.

The long-term economic picture, according to the researchers, is likely to worsen before it improves. Construction delays tied to labor shortages are expected to push housing prices higher, while continued enforcement activity could sustain the climate of fear that has already suppressed spending in targeted communities.

Mass deportations were sold as an economic gain for American workers. Instead, they appear to have triggered a cascading series of job losses that cut across industries, communities, and citizenship status. The story of who actually bears the cost of this crackdown is becoming harder to spin away with every new study published.