Immigration advocacy organizations are out to create shock-value numbers that overestimate the real costs of deportation.
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In testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, American Immigration Council (AIC) Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick remarked last week that mass deportations would cost “at a minimum” $316 billion.
The AIC estimates that there is an annual cost of $88 billion to deport one million illegal aliens each year. That breaks down to $7 billion for arrests, $66 billion for detentions, $12.6 billion to go through the legal process, and $2.1 billion to transport deportees out of the country. It works out to $88,000 per deportee, but the council claims this is a “highly conservative estimate.” They conclude there is “a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.”
