Approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently reside in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, puts the figure at 25 million. Other estimates fall in between the two.
Regardless of the number, former president Donald Trump has vowed to launch the largest deportation program in American history. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Vance said it would be “certainly reasonable to deport around a million people per year.” The undertaking enjoys broad public support, at least for now — a CBS/YouGov poll from July found that 62% of Americans favor mass deportations, including 53% of Hispanic voters.
Vice President Kamala Harris favors a bipartisan approach to fixing border security by extending restrictions on asylum claims and establishing legal pathways for eligible immigrants.
A mass-deportation project comes with enormous implications for a nation long bedeviled by an insecure southern border and lax enforcement of immigration laws. Proponents of Trump’s plan argue it would benefit working-class Americans by freeing up jobs and driving up wages, which they believe are affected by undocumented immigrant laborers, who work for much less. They also maintain that mass deportations would dramatically improve national security by removing known criminals and stopping the flow of potential terror threats into the country.
Opponents, however, believe the deportation project would cause immediate economic damage by creating labor shortages and reducing both tax revenue and economic growth. And beneath the surface of these designs runs a political undercurrent, informed by heavy moral stakes, that could shake up American politics in a way few government programs could.
For Ken Cuccinelli, deputy secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) and the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under Trump, the scale of the program has no bearing on the underlying moral dimension.
“I don’t think the scale really has any effect on the moral question of it,” Cuccinelli, a Catholic, told the Register. “Richer nations have an obligation to welcome migrants, and migrants have an obligation to respect the laws and customs of the place to which they are migrating, and the people we are talking about haven’t done that.”
But Kristin Heyer, the Joseph Chair professor of theology at Boston College, sees Trump’s proposed mass-deportation plan as morally problematic.
“From a Catholic perspective, the proposed mass-deportation plan raises deep moral concerns about undermining human dignity and the right to seek asylum, harming family unity and the common good, and risking a police state,” she told the Register. “It invites demonization of racial, ethnic and religious minorities, a structural sin that has harmed human dignity and solidarity as well as malformed our collective imagination on immigration and national identity alike.”
In September, Pope Francis remarked about “those who systematically work by all means to drive away migrants,” saying that “this, when done knowingly and deliberately, is a grave sin.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that good government has two duties in this regard: to welcome the foreigner out of charity and respect; and to secure one’s border and enforce the law for the sake of the common good (2241).
Economic Impact
For Hannah Kling, professor of data analytics and macroeconomics at Belmont Abbey College, mass deportations “would be extremely disruptive economically.”
Above all, Kling fears that mass deportations would decrease overall economic growth, which would harm everyone in the long run, including natural-born citizens. In her view, a high number of immigrants in the economy leads to economic growth, which has positive benefits not only for consumers, but also other workers. There isn’t a fixed amount of jobs over which citizens and noncitizens compete, but rather an ever-increasing number of jobs that increases to the extent that individuals and businesses are productive.
“People who work in landscaping or food service and the like help those companies become more productive companies,” she said. “It wasn’t that immigrant workers were crowding out U.S. citizens from jobs. Economic growth is about increasing the economic pie that we split up among people. When more people are part of that system, we can make the pie bigger.”
A recent Bloomberg analysis shows that Trump’s deportations and border crackdown could reduce the nation’s GDP by more than 3% by 2028.
Along with reduced overall economic growth, some economists have voiced concern that mass deportations would lead to increased government spending and reduced tax revenues, a combination of factors that could balloon the national deficit.
According to a 2024 study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), undocumented immigrants paid a total of $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022. Meanwhile, the American Immigration Council estimated that it could cost $88 billion annually to deport 1 million people a year.
For Boston College’s Heyer, the numbers simply don’t add up.
“Estimates suggest the mass-deportation plan would cost at least $500 billion to implement, with annual losses of $126 billion in taxes and a reduction in the GDP of $5 trillion over 10 years,” she said. “This confounds the ‘economic threat’ claims frequently made to oppose immigrants, whose work, studies show, offer a net benefit to the U.S. economy and have increased jobs in recent years.”
Cuccinelli, however, believes the economic benefits of mass deportations outweigh the costs. As evidence, he cites 2019 economic statistics that show America achieving its lowest poverty rate in the history of the statistic. He believes that two factors contributed to this achievement: Trump’s economic policy of tax cuts and deregulation, which spurred growth, and meaningful enforcement of laws against illegal immigration.
“The people who benefit most from these policies is American poor people,” Cuccinelli said. “They have more available jobs and more upward wage pressure. They are no longer competing against the world’s poor for work in their home country. The people on the lowest rung of the economic ladder saw their wages go up by the highest percentage — and we should celebrate that.”
Many have argued in the past that Americans won’t do certain “undesirable” jobs in agriculture, hospitality and construction often done by illegal immigrants. Mass deportations, the argument goes, will cause labor shortages that would have the potential to significantly disrupt supply lines and raise costs for businesses and consumers.
In response, Cuccinelli recalled the 2019 raid of seven Mississippi chicken-processing plants that saw 680 undocumented workers arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which was among the largest single-state immigration-enforcement actions in U.S. history. In the proceeding days, Koch Foods held a job fair in the area, attracting hundreds of U.S. citizens, mostly Black men, to fill the positions.
“There’s never been a legal job Americans won’t do,” he said. “When you hear that come out of somebody’s mouth, you know you are talking to an elitist. And you can tell them I said so.”
The Politics of Deportation
The politics of illegal immigration now largely favor the Trump-led Republican Party, as they have in recent years. While Trump’s signature issue, the construction of a southern border wall, was widely mocked during his successful 2016 run for the White House, it now enjoys broad public support — and even tacit support by Democratic politicians.
At a CNN town hall last week, moderator Anderson Cooper pressed Vice President Kamala Harris on her previous denunciations of the border-wall project, which she had previously referred to as a “medieval vanity project.” The Democratic Party candidate appeared to sputter in response, unwilling to criticize the construction of the wall and signaling openness to it, saying, “I’m not afraid of good ideas where they occur.”
But while Democrats have been hurt by endless video clips of migrant caravans streaming across the border in recent years, Republicans would stand to suffer from video clips of poor migrants being returned to the border and released into the Mexican desert.
“This polls favorably with American people now, but when real human beings, lots of them, are being removed from this country, that’s going to affect people’s hearts, and a number of them will move against it,” Cuccinelli admitted. “And I understand that. It’s human nature. The Washington Post and New York Times are going to rend their garments. It could have a very real effect.”
For Kling, the images that would emerge from mass deportations will merely reinforce preexisting biases.
“I think people will confirm what they already think,” she said. “People who are opposed to mass deportations will see sad images of families being ushered out of the country, while people in favor of them will see people who look like foreign criminals looking like they’re doing criminal things.”
The dangers associated with not knowing who is in the country outweigh political concerns for Cuccinelli. He cited the early-October case of the Afghan migrant who was apprehended in connection with an ISIS-style Election Day terror plot as a compelling enough reason to crack down on illegal immigration no matter the political fallout.
“Here we had an unvetted Afghan ‘refugee’ from a country that Pew Research says 99.9% of its population wants to introduce sharia [Islamic] law wherever they are, planning to commit terrorism on Election Day,” he said. “And who knows what would have been? And that was only the near term. You have plenty of people, particularly jihadis, who will lie and wait for years, who are essentially sleeper cells. And that danger is going to be with us for a long time.”
For Heyer, the rights and hardships of migrants must also be considered when weighing the security risks involved with mass deportations.
“Conflating migrants of various statuses, not to mention citizens potentially deemed a risk, violates Catholic teaching that establishes not only persons’ rights not to migrate — to fulfill human rights in their homeland — but also their right to migrate if they cannot support themselves or their families in their country of origin,” she told the Register. “In situations where individuals face pervasive gang violence or desperate poverty, the Catholic tradition supports the right to freedom of movement so that persons can live free from credible fears of violence or severe want. Robust human rights are rooted in creation in the image of God and do not depend on citizenship status in the tradition.”
In recent days, Trump officials have said he would withhold federal police grants from local law enforcement agencies that decline to take part in the deportations, a move that could prompt legal challenges. The move signals the seriousness of the plan for mass deportations should he win reelection on Tuesday.
