After campaigning to enact mass deportations on what he said would be “day one” of his second administration, President Donald Trump seems to have largely kept his promise to remove undocumented immigrants from the country. He began the crackdown by targeting primarily Democratic-run cities, leading to the deportation of more than 105,000 people between Jan. 1 and June 11 of this year alone. Permanent residents and U.S. citizens soon got caught up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and were arrested and detained for weeks, just as Trump was touting the measures were necessary to bring more jobs to Americans and ending the presumed cycle of immigrants taking so-called “Hispanic” and “Black jobs.”
But a recent Brookings study shows that ICE operations had the exact opposite effect. The campaigns have cost the U.S. economy 668,000 jobs for both U.S.-born and foreign-born workers, researchers found. Job losses in cities with the highest ICE activity grew over time, leading to 30 jobs lost for every arrest.
The researchers found that job losses following ICE operations in American cities extended far beyond the number of people arrested. While the U.S. unemployment rate has been creeping up since April 2023, the researchers were able to isolate the effect of ICE activity by focusing on the cities that saw the most ICE arrests.
ICE operations lead to more job losses over time
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, according to the Deportation Data Project.
Employment fell 0.73% on average across the top quarter of cities that experienced the most intense ICE actions, including Knoxville, Tenn., Houston, and San Diego. In the cities where the 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 the ICE enforcement surges that occurred between January and June 2025 and studied employment trends until September 2025. Given the employment rates in the six months, Escobari and Seyal expect that in the months since, employment rates declined even further.
The study echoes other recent studies that overwhelmingly find 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.
Jobs held by immigrants are intrinsically linked to U.S.-born workers
Even in a rough labor market, ICE operations had an outsized effect on employment rates in the cities ICE targeted.
“The employment trajectories diverge exactly when an ICE surge hits a city. 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,” said Marcela Escobari, vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings, who co-authored the study.
She and her coauthors estimate that of 668,000 jobs lost, 51,000 to 297,000 were held by U.S.-born workers. Construction, hospitality, and food services—industries with large immigrant workforces—were hit the hardest by ICE operations, and those losses affected American workers, the researchers found. 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.
“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,” Escobari added.
A larger blow to local economic activity
ICE’s very public and often violent operations across American cities—including worksite raids, home arrests, and detaining Americans and immigrants with legal status—have led to a larger chilling effect across the economy. One University of Pennsylvania study using cell phone and credit card data found that ICE activity led to declines in foot traffic and consumer spending.
“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,” Escobari explained.
Even industries without large immigrant workers were impacted by what the researchers called “fear-driven demand suppression” caused by widespread news reporting on ICE operations. For example, the arts and entertainment lost jobs due to fewer people leaving their houses.
In the long term, the researchers expect to see an even larger negative impact on the economy due to ICE operations.
“There’s a good chance that we will see prices going up…prices of goods and services, and also home prices, as construction gets delayed,” said Ian Seyal, one of the study’s co-authors and a senior research analyst at Brookings.
