In Data: The economic cost of Trump's mass deportation plan

MEXICO CITY - To supercharge a mass deportation crackdown, U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing what he calls his "Big Beautiful Bill" for lawmakers to direct $168 billion to increased immigration enforcement.

The bill projects $75 billion in funding to be aimed at expanding the detention and deportation operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the National Immigration Forum.

But Trump's crackdown, which has already doubled the number of arrests of immigrants, has economic consequences in terms of estimated gross domestic product (GDP) loss and tax revenue as well as likely labour shortages in the construction and hospitality sectors.

How many workers could be deported?

Out of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2022, 8.3 million were part of the workforce that year, according to the Pew Research Center.

While undocumented immigrants only represented 4.8% of the U.S. labour force in 2022, almost 90% were between 16 and 64 years old and so have a high participation in the workforce.

Trump's mass deportation plan would have the biggest impact on California, Texas and Florida, where one in every 20 residents is an undocumented immigrant, according to estimates by the American Immigration Council.

Which industries will be affected?

The employment of undocumented immigrants sustains multiple industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction.

Undocumented migrants also represent one in every 14 workers in the hospitality industry, and a quarter of cleaners.

According to research by the American Immigration Council, 14% of workers in the construction industry are undocumented immigrants.

Trump's immigration crackdown is already affecting construction workers, who say they worry about the risks of reporting to their job sites.

Experts say the crackdown could exacerbate a labour shortage in the industry, which needs to bring in 439,000 workers this year to keep up with demand, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association.

Immigrants represent one in eight workers in agriculture, so mass deportations would lead to labour shortages and to higher food prices, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said.

This would impact inflation, with prices rising up to 9% in a scenario in which the highest number of workers were deported, it said.

How important are undocumented workers to U.S. economy?

The libertarian Cato Institute estimates the "Big Beautiful Bill" will have a fiscal cost of $886 billion in the next decade due to removing millions of immigrants who help reduce the country's deficit and debt.

Likewise, the Peterson Institute estimates the U.S. economy could shrink by 1.2% by 2028 if the government deported 1.3 million people, which it considers to be at the low end of its goal.

Gross domestic product could fall by 7.4% in the same period if all 8.3 million undocumented immigrants working in the United States are deported, it said.

Total immigrants - both legal and undocumented - have accounted for a fifth of the country's real GDP growth since 2019, according to an analysis by Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at The Budget Lab at Yale University.

They contributed $4.6 billion in consumer spending and $48 billion in personal income - or overall earnings - in 2023, according to economic policy initiative Hamilton Project.

Tedeschi's analysis also found the U.S. labour force would have shrunk by 1.2 million between 2019 and 2023 without the presence of immigrants, making them an important source of tax revenue.

Mass deportation could lead to a massive loss of tax revenue and contributions to social benefits, according to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022.

Undocumented workers contributed $25.7 billion to Social Security, $6.4 billion to Medicare and $1.8 billion to unemployment insurance in 2022, even though they are not always eligible for such programmes.

This group contributed $8.5 billion in taxes to California, $4.9 billion to Texas, $3.1 billion to New York and $1.8 billion to Florida in 2022, research shows.

This article was updated on June 30, 2025 to include the latest developments.

(Reporting by Diana Baptista; Editing by Anastasia Moloney, Ana Nicolaci da Costa and Jon Hemming.)