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Democrats have constantly claimed that deporting illegal immigrants would be prohibitively expensive, costing taxpayers more than letting them stay and enjoy government benefits. And as is always the case, they’re dead wrong.

American Immigration Council (AIC) Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick recently told a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on mass deportation that removing illegal immigrants from the country would cost taxpayers in excess of $316 billion.

“You estimate, at least in one publication here, that the cost of massive deportation would be $316 billion?” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked.

“At a minimum,” Reichlin-Melnick responded.

However, the former Crime Prevention Research Center president, John R. Lott, Jr., estimated the cost of removing undocumented individuals from the country has been exaggerated up to sevenfold.

“When the AIC cost estimates are six to seven times larger than the per deportee costs that we have actually observed over the last decade, you would hope people would be skeptical.” – Lott wrote.

Besides the projected figures, President Trump insists that the cost of removing illegal immigrants has no price tag. 

“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not really, we have no choice,’ Trump told NBC News. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, also reiterated that deporting illegal immigrants was a priority regardless of the cost.

According to the AIC, deporting 1 million illegal immigrants costs almost $88 billion per year in arrests ($7 billion), detention ($66 billion), legal processes ($12.6 billion), and transport ($2.1 billion), averaging about $88,000 per individual by the most conservative estimates. Over a decade, the cost balloons to about $967.9 billion.

However, Lott noted that the AIC figures exclude government subsidies on food and accommodation for illegal immigrants. Including this amount significantly reduces the cost of detention from the projected $66 billion.

Lott also noted that the AIC’s projected cost of detaining one million illegal immigrants accounts for more than three-quarters of the projected amount.  He pointed out that the estimate assumes that all one million deportees must be detained simultaneously for one year. 

However, the average detention time is usually less than two months, meaning that only 167,000 deportees should be housed at a particular moment. 

Lott also noted that some estimates suggest a detainment period of less than one month, resulting in only 83,000 deportees being housed within a particular period. According to AIC, 41,500 detainment facilities already exist, thus reducing the number of new buildings to be constructed.

“The AIC assumes each facility holds 500 beds, so 83 new facilities will have to be built. With each facility costing $35.91 million, that comes to a cost of $3 billion, a fraction of the $66 billion.”

“The problem with the AIC numbers is even worse than that because they must rebuild 216 completely new facilities each and every year, but that isn’t necessary as these facilities will last for years.”

The researcher also noted that the daily cost of detaining a deportee was grossly exaggerated at $237 per individual and $482 for a family.

“In the United States in 2022, the daily cost for prisoners in federal medium security prisons is $122.50, and for high-security prisons is $164.87. Privately operated institutions for federal prisoners are only $93.50 a day per capita,” he noted.

Based on existing data, the cost of deporting an individual falls from the projected $88,000 to just between $13,706 and $15,499.

“From 2015 to 2022, per capita deportation costs in 2024 dollars averaged $12,124. They range from $9,767 under Obama, $11,637 for Trump, and $15,499 for Biden.”

“Even if we include the entire Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget, which involves many other customs activities, the per-deportee costs from 2002 to 2022 average $13,706 in 2024 dollars.”

“The year with the most deportations, 2004, saw 1.4 million deportees with a total ICE budget in 2024 dollars of $6.1 billion, or $4,354 per deportee,” Lott continued.

Similarly, the cost of detaining and deporting 662,566 illegal immigrants with a criminal record would cost $8 billion. However, the cost of victimization for crimes committed by noncitizens is about $166.5 billion.

“The costs of crime are roughly at least 21 times higher than deportation costs,” Lott added.

In 2017, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, Steven A. Camarota, estimated that the net cost of allowing each illegal immigrant to stay was $63,000.

“Sometimes people say look, we couldn’t deport everybody because it’s prohibitively expensive,” he said. “But if your only concern is fiscal cost, it’s pretty clear that letting them stay is a hell of a lot more expensive.”