The Cost of Removals
The final step of the removal process involves physically repatriating a person to their home country. For individuals who are not permitted to voluntarily repatriate through commercial air flight, this process is carried out by ICE’s Transportation and Removal Program (TRP). For individuals from Mexico, this process generally entails transportation to the U.S.-Mexico border by bus or airplane, after which the person is repatriated by land (some individuals are also repatriated by flight to Mexico City). Individuals from Canada can be deported by ground transportation. Individuals from every other country can only be repatriated by air. ICE does not have its own fleet of planes. Instead, its “ICE Air” operations are operated by contractors who provide the planes and pilots.
Many countries are “recalcitrant” and largely do not permit the United States to carry out deportation flights (or permit only a handful of flights per year). These countries include places such as Russia, China, Venezuela, India, and Mauritania. That means that even if the United States could obtain removal orders for every undocumented immigrant from those countries, it could not deport those individuals unless a third country stepped up and agreed to take them. As a result, it is currently diplomatically impossible to remove all undocumented immigrants. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this analysis alone, we assume that every person can be repatriated to their home country, and that ICE would not use commercial air repatriations for individuals held in detention and ordered removed during a multi-year mass deportation operation.
Removing 13.3 Million People in a Single Operation
In 2023, Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson testified at a Congressional hearing that the average ICE Air removal flight cost roughly $17,000 per flight hour. We use this $17,000 figure as our baseline estimate for costs incurred in any removal flight. For individuals deported to Mexico, we conclude that roughly 10 percent would be deported by air (as ICE reported in 2016), while the remaining 90 percent would be deported by ground transportation.
ICE has never provided an exact cost of ground transportation. In 2007, at a time when the vast majority of ICE removals were to Mexico, agency officials indicated that the cost of removal transportation was roughly $1,000 per person. Adjusted for inflation, that figure is now $1,479.29. We estimate that roughly 4.8 million undocumented Mexicans and Canadians present in the U.S. as of 2022 (as well as an additional 340,000 Mexicans released after crossing the border between January 2023 and April 2024) would be removable by bus at a total cost of $7 billion.
For the 8.5 million individuals who were present as of 2022 or who arrived across the southern border after that point and would be removed by plane, we first calculated the average flight hours necessary to remove each nationality and then generated a cost per deportation flight per nationality. We estimate that the cost of removal flights for this population would be $17.1 billion in total.
Our estimate presumes that a mass deportation operation of this scale would require over 65,700 individual removal flights. That compares to an average of just 137.6 removal flights in the last year. In other words, to deport 13.3 million undocumented immigrants over a single event, ICE would have to find enough flight capacity to increase its annual removal flights by nearly 47,500 percent in a short period of time.
To deport 13.3M undocumented immigrants over a single event, ICE would have to find enough flight capacity to increase its annual removal flights by nearly+47,500%in a short period of time.
Under our model, the total cost of removing 11 million undocumented immigrants in a single mass deportation operation comes to an estimated $20.6 billion. If we include the costs of removing the 2.3 million new arrivals from 2023 through April 2024, we expect an additional $3.4 billion in costs. Therefore, we estimate the total removal costs for a mass-deportation operation at $24.1 billion.
Our estimate is undoubtedly conservative. We do not calculate the cost of building new staging facilities for deportation flights, as the choice of location and size would have a significant impact on cost estimates and is therefore impossible to calculate. We also know that previous efforts to dramatically increase removals have come at very high costs. In September 2021, following the mass crossing event in Del Rio, Texas—where over 10,000 Haitian nationals crossed the border in a three-day period—ICE signed an emergency air contract to run 44 removal flights to Haiti in a two-week period at an average per-flight cost of $179,079. Adjusted for inflation, this figure is roughly 26 percent higher than our estimate of the cost of a regular removal flight to Haiti in 2023 dollars. Therefore, we presume that the actual costs of any mass removal operation would likely be significantly higher than our estimate.
Removing One Million Undocumented Immigrants Per Year
Costs of removal would also be very high in any scenario where deportations were increased to one million per year. Assuming again for the purposes of this analysis that mass repatriations are possible even to countries which are currently “recalcitrant,” and that roughly 20 percent of the undocumented population would voluntarily depart during a mass removal operation, we estimate that 10.6 million people would still need to be removed.
Using the calculations above, we estimate that the average cost of a removal, either by flight or by bus, is $1,815.14. Therefore, we estimate the flight and bus cost alone to remove one million people per year at $1,815,140,000.
In order to reach a figure of one million deportations per year, the agency would also have to significantly increase its current staffing. From Fiscal Year 2015 through 2019 (before years impacted by the COVID pandemic), ICE averaged 245,026 removals per year at an average staff cost per removal of $69.95. Therefore, we estimate an annual staff cost of at least $69,950,000 per year. Accounting for annual inflation of 2.5 percent, we estimate that the costs of removing one million individuals per year would total $22.4 billion, or an average of $2.1 billion per year.
As with the prior estimate, this is likely a significantly conservative figure. Under this scenario, ICE would still be required to increase its removal flight capacity per year by 3,720 percent, which would likely increase the cost per flight hour significantly due to the current challenges in the aviation market of finding sufficient pilots and planes. We were also unable to estimate the additional costs necessary to obtain more charter aircraft for removals, given the impossibility of predicting the private commercial decisions that would entail.
