The Math Doesn’t Lie: ICE Raids Were Supposed to Protect American Jobs. A New Study Says They Wiped Out 668,000 of Them
The promise was simple and it was repeated often: remove undocumented immigrants from the workforce, and American workers would step in and prosper. More jobs, better wages, less competition.
It was one of the core economic arguments behind the Trump administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement push in recent U.S. history.
The only problem, according to a sweeping new study from the Brookings Institution, is that the math ran the other way entirely.
The Trump administration’s immigration surge into U.S. cities last year resulted in 668,000 job losses, creating a “chilling effect” that pervaded local economies, hurt businesses, and affected American-born workers, according to the report from the Brookings Institution.
The study, titled Shock, Awe, and Economic Fallout, does not pull its punches. The current administration’s 2025 interior immigration enforcement campaign had been promoted, in large part, as a labor market policy: remove unauthorized workers and create jobs for Americans.
The research evaluates that claim and finds the reverse: enforcement surges cost jobs, including jobs held by American-born workers. That is not a small asterisk on an otherwise positive story. That is the headline.
Thirty Jobs Gone for Every Arrest Made
To understand how dramatic these numbers are, it helps to start with the scale of what actually happened on the ground in 2025.
ICE arrested about 52,000 people across 86 cities with the most ICE enforcement activities between January and June 2025. For example, Laredo, a city on the Southern border, experienced an average of 803 ICE arrests a month after ICE operations began, up from a monthly average of 6 arrests.
On the whole, ICE street arrests increased by a factor of 11 times during the first year of Trump’s second administration.
The 2025 approach, in the administration’s own description, was built around “shock and awe” tactics: highly visible raids, worksite arrests, and viral videos of detentions, acts designed to induce fear in a broad population.
Fear, it turns out, has an economic cost. Job losses in cities with the highest ICE activity grew over time, leading to 30 jobs lost for every arrest.
The researchers were careful to isolate this effect from the broader economic noise, tariffs, inflation, global uncertainty, that was also moving markets in 2025.
“The employment trajectories diverge exactly when an ICE surge hits a city,” said Marcela Escobari, vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings, who co-authored the study.
“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.”
Employment fell 0.73% on average across the top quarter of cities that experienced the most intense ICE actions, including Knoxville, Tennessee, Houston, and San Diego.
In the cities where researchers could observe employment rates at least six months before ICE activity spiked, employment fell 1.48% compared to cities that did not experience a surge in ICE activity.
The study covered ICE enforcement surges that occurred between January and June 2025 and studied employment trends until September 2025.
Given the employment rates in those six months, the researchers expect that in the months since, employment rates declined even further.
American Workers Got Caught in the Crossfire
Perhaps the most politically inconvenient finding in the entire report is this: of the 668,000 estimated jobs lost across those 86 cities, between 51,000 and 297,000 would have been held by American-born workers.
The policy was sold as a gift to American workers. The data suggests a significant portion of those workers lost their jobs because of it.
The mechanism is not particularly complicated once you understand how labor markets actually function.
Construction workers are an integral part of home building, and without the structures they build, U.S.-born project managers, electricians, and building inspectors cannot do their jobs.
Remove one part of the workforce, and you do not simply create a vacancy, you can halt the entire operation.
Construction and other industries that traditionally employ large numbers of undocumented workers experienced some of the largest employment declines.
The report also found job losses in sectors such as arts and entertainment, where immigrant employment is relatively limited.
That last detail is worth sitting with: industries that barely employ undocumented workers also saw job losses, meaning the effect spread well beyond the sectors directly hit by arrests.
Escobari described how businesses responded to the sudden labor gaps. “Many businesses just can’t easily replace the missing workers.
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,” she said.
This dynamic can be seen in a comparison of 2025 enforcement to the next most recent large-scale federal enforcement effort: Secure Communities, a program that began in 2008 under the Bush administration and scaled up during the Obama presidency.
Whereas Secure Communities operated largely behind the scenes, the 2025 campaign was designed to be visible. Agents conducted worksite raids, entered private homes, and made arrests outside schools, churches, and hospitals.
The visibility was not incidental, it was the strategy. And the visibility is precisely what made the economic damage so broad.
Even workers and business owners who were never directly touched by an arrest changed their behavior because of what they were seeing around them.
The Ripple Goes Further Than the Raid
The Brookings study is not the first to reach these conclusions, but it is among the most comprehensive. The study echoes other recent research that overwhelmingly finds that ICE campaigns have negatively affected U.S.-born citizens.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder found that for every undocumented male worker arrested, about six males left the workplace.
The Charlotte, North Carolina story illustrates how rapidly the damage can accumulate in a single metro area.
A report from the Brookings Institution estimates that increased immigration enforcement in the Charlotte area cost the region nearly 10,000 jobs during the first half of 2025.
Average monthly ICE arrests in the Charlotte region increased from about 31 in 2024 to 160 after March 2025, a more than 400% increase.
That is nearly 10,000 jobs in one city, in six months, from an enforcement surge that directly arrested a fraction of that number of people.
According to the study, businesses reduced staffing and activity as immigration enforcement operations became more visible and concerns spread through local communities.
Companies that relied partly on immigrant labor often scaled back operations after facing labor shortages, affecting both immigrant and native-born employees.
The Brookings researchers used data from the Deportation Data Project, which tracks ICE arrests through the Freedom of Information Act, alongside employment estimates from labor market research firm Lightcast and federal payroll records.
The methodology was designed specifically to rule out the possibility that these job losses were caused by other concurrent economic pressures.
The question this study leaves hanging is a political and economic one that will define a significant portion of the coming debate about what the 2025 enforcement push actually cost the country.
The administration framed deportations as a labor market policy. The Brookings findings suggest that framing did not survive contact with the actual data.
Six hundred and sixty-eight thousand jobs. Thirty lost for every one arrest. And between 51,000 and 297,000 of those belonging to American-born workers who had nothing to do with undocumented immigration at all, except that they built their livelihoods alongside people who did.
