吃瓜大本营

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents descended upon Minnesota in the infamous 鈥淥peration Metro Surge,鈥� they didn鈥檛 just arrest thousands of people and kill two people, traumatizing communities and needlessly spreading violence. They damaged the local economy 鈥� costing Minnesota businesses $10鈥�$20 million a week in the aftermath, as people were terrified to to leave their homes to do ordinary things like go to work, school, doctors appointments.

The Trump administration鈥檚 deportation agenda is destabilizing communities across the nation, costing billions of taxpayer dollars, at a time when working families can鈥檛 afford groceries, childcare, rent, gas, and other essentials. According to , 95 percent of Americans believe there is an affordability crisis in the United States. But our economy isn鈥檛 just failing because of inflation and broken supply chains. The Trump administration鈥檚 mass deportation campaign is also largely to blame.

A new report from the ACLU and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 鈥淐itizenship and the Affordability Agenda: A Path to Better Jobs, Higher Wages, and Prosperity for All,鈥� highlights how mass deportations are killing jobs, raising prices, and damaging businesses.

The report also offers a practical solution: Urge policymakers to create a broader path to citizenship to stabilize jobs, raise wages, and trade this economy of fear for one that benefits working families across the nation.

Here, we break down key takeaways from the report to illustrate how President Donald Trump鈥檚 deportation agenda is impacting people鈥檚 livelihoods and how transformative immigration reform can improve the affordability crisis.

Administration officials claim that deporting immigrants will help create jobs and open up employment opportunities for U.S citizens. But the data tells a different story: Studies consistently link increased ICE activity to employment declines for all workers, immigrants and U.S.-born alike.

Roughly one in five workers in our country is an immigrant, and immigrants and U.S.-born workers are often linked through the same supply chains and industries. When enforcement actions remove workers from that chain, employers typically respond not by hiring citizens to fill the gap, but by cutting operations, delaying projects, and reducing hiring altogether 鈥� shrinking the labor supply and employers' revenue. Construction illustrates the scale: economists estimate the mass deportation agenda could eliminate nearly 20 percent of the construction workforce 鈥� 1.4 million jobs, 860,000 of them currently held by U.S.-born workers.

Looking ahead, the unemployment rate will only get worse with continued immigration enforcement. According to the , continued deportations could wipe out nearly 6 million jobs nationwide, almost half of which are currently held by U.S. citizens.

Immigration raids have terrified people from going to work, shopping, dining out, and participating in their communities 鈥� creating what economist Exequiel Hernandez calls an "economy of fear." The result is an estimated 8.1 billion fewer visits to businesses and between $3 billion and $14 billion in lost annual spending. "When you remove or scare a significant number of people from participating in the economy,鈥� Hernandez said, 鈥測ou kick off a downward spiral" Fewer workers showing up means less income, less spending, more business contraction, and fewer jobs for everyone, including U.S.-born workers.

The damage concentrates in cities targeted by aggressive ICE operations and in industries that depend on immigrant labor. In Minnesota, the found that an enforcement surge in spring 2025 cost the state's leisure-and-hospitality sector 4,600 jobs, 3.8 million work hours, and $71 million in wages in just three months 鈥� hitting construction, hospitality, and caregiving hardest, the same industries most reliant on immigrant workers nationwide.

Prices are rising in the United States, and people are struggling to pay for groceries, housing, utilities, and healthcare. While inflation is impacting nearly every sector of the economy, the prices of labor-intensive goods and services provided by immigrants are climbing at a much higher rate.

One report showed that, over a recent 12-month period, while core inflation rose just 2.6 percent, prices in immigrant-labor-intensive sectors spiked far more sharply: lettuce rose nearly 32 percent, landscaping services rose 10.8 percent, home health care rose 10.7 percent, whole milk rose 9 percent, and canned fruit rose 7.9 percent. In the construction industry, research from a previous period of mass deportations found that immigration enforcement caused nearly 2,000 fewer homes to be completed per state per year, resulting in an 18 percent increase in new home prices.With construction workers once again a target of the current enforcement and deportation agenda, the shortage in work could once again result in fewer homes being built and a general increase in home prices.

Instead of ensuring that working people have access to affordable healthcare, nutrition, or housing, Congress has spent $240 billion to fund immigration enforcement. That鈥檚 hundreds of millions of dollars that could鈥檝e gone to vital programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act subsidies.

The federal government also now spends 91 times more on immigration enforcement than labor standards enforcements. This leaves workplaces more dangerous and enables employers to violate wage, safety, and overtime laws 鈥� reducing standards for all workers regardless of immigration status.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are footing the bill for this mass deportations agenda. We each pay an average of $2,358 per year to support it, while steadily losing access to vital services that working families rely on.

We don鈥檛 have to continue living in an economy of fear. A broad path to citizenship 鈥� not temporary, revocable protections 鈥� would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, generate an estimated $1.7 trillion in GDP growth, and raise wages for everyone, immigrant and U.S.-born workers alike. History bears this out: After the 1986 immigration reform granted legal status to millions, affected workers saw their incomes rise by more than 25 percent. When we expand rights and protections for immigrant workers, we remove the leverage employers use to suppress pay and silence organizing 鈥� and that lifts job opportunities and conditions for everyone.

As the human and economic toll of the mass deportation agenda mounts, we call on Congress to act now 鈥� not with another stopgap, but with transformative immigration reform that opens a broad path to citizenship. Temporary fixes only prolong the instability driving today's crisis. A real path to citizenship would set off the opposite ripple effect: stimulating businesses, expanding job opportunities, and restoring stability and dignity to working families across the nation.