Mass deportations

Extracted Attributes

• Legal Basis

  Alien Enemies Act of 1798

• Policy Goal

  1,000,000 deportations per year

• Labor Force Impact

  5% reduction in total U.S. labor force

• Estimated 10-Year Cost

  $900,000,000,000

• Economic Impact (Texas)

  $60,000,000,000 annual GDP reduction

• Economic Impact (California)

  $103,000,000,000 annual GDP reduction

• Total Unauthorized Population (2022)

  11,000,000 people

Timeline

• The U.S. government begins mass deportations of over 1 million Mexican nationals during the Great Depression. (Source: History.com)

  1930-01-01

• Operation Wetback is launched, resulting in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. (Source: History.com)

  1954-01-01

• Public opinion shifts to a majority supporting mass deportations at the start of Trump's second term. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-01-01

• ICE begins raids on sanctuary cities, including Minneapolis where Operation Metro Surge leads to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Prey. (Source: Wikipedia and Document c484da6a-3ab3-47a7-979f-df254e6fc84a)

  2025-01-23

• The administration claims 140,000 deportations; polls indicate a majority of Americans believe the policy has gone too far. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-04-01

• CNN reports that ICE alone has deported nearly 200,000 people in the seven months since Trump returned to office. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-08-28

Deportation in the second Trump administration

During Donald Trump's second and current tenure as the president of the United States, his administration has pursued a deportation policy generally described by both advocates and detractors as "hardline", "maximalist", and as a "mass deportation" campaign, involving the detention, confinement, and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of suspected illegal immigrants and their family members. The Trump administration has claimed that around 140,000 people had been deported as of April 2025, though some estimates put the number at roughly half that number. On August 28, 2025, CNN reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alone had deported nearly 200,000 people in seven months since Trump returned to office. On January 23, 2025, ICE began to carry out raids on sanctuary cities, with hundreds of immigrants detained and deported. The Trump administration reversed the policy of the previous administration and gave ICE permission to raid schools, hospitals and places of worship. The use of deportation flights by the U.S. has created pushback from some foreign governments, particularly that of Colombia. Fears of ICE raids have negatively impacted agriculture, construction, and the hospitality industry. The total population of illegal immigrants in the United States was estimated at 11 million in 2022, with the top 3 states of California, Texas, and Florida constituting over half of the total population. ICE agents conducting raids frequently travel in unmarked vehicles, wear plainclothes and facial coverings, and refuse to identify themselves or present warrants. The deportations have been faced with widespread controversy and protests, such as the one in Los Angeles. The administration has used the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport suspected illegal immigrants with limited or no due process, and to be imprisoned in El Salvador, which was halted by federal judges and the Supreme Court. It ordered the re-opening of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to hold potentially tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, but has faced logistical and legal difficulties using it as an immigrant camp. The majority of detentions have been for non-violent matters. Several American citizens were mistakenly and unfairly detained and deported. Administration practices have faced legal issues and controversy with lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. Thousands of people detained by ICE have disappeared from ICE records and their whereabouts are unknown. Trump had discussed deportations during his presidential campaign in 2016, during his first presidency (2017–2021), and in his 2024 presidential campaign. At the time of the 2016 lead-up to his first presidential term, approximately one-third of Americans supported deporting all immigrants present in the United States illegally, and at the time of the January 2025 start to his second presidential term, public opinion had shifted, with a majority of Americans in support, according to a January 2025 review. As early as April 2025, multiple polls found that the majority of Americans thought that the deportations went "too far".

Web Search Results

• The Largest Mass Deportation in American History

  Mexican farm laborers going to California to work on garden crops. (Photo by William C. Shrout/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) Mass deportations of Mexican immigrants from the U.S. date to the Great Depression, when the federal government began a wave of deportations rather than include Mexican-born workers in New Deal welfare programs. According to historian Francisco Balderrama, the U.S. deported over 1 million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, during the 1930s. Balderrama toldFresh Air’s Terry Gross that the program was referred to as “repatriation” to give it the sense of being voluntary. In reality, though, it was anything but. [...] It’s not clear how many American citizens were swept up in Operation Wetback, but the United States later claimed that 1.3 million people total were deported. However, some historians dispute that claim. Though hundreds of thousands of people were ensnared, says historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the number of deportees was drastically lower than the United States reported—likely closer to 300,000. Due to immigrants who were caught, deported, and captured again after re-emigrating, it’s impossible to estimate the total number of people deported under the program. Mexican farm laborers going to California to work on garden crops. (Photo by William C. Shrout/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) [...] During Operation Wetback, tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives. In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.

• Deportation from the United States - Wikipedia

  ### Economic and political [edit] Sociological critiques often frame mass deportation as an integral component of the neoliberal phase of global capitalism. Tanya Golash-Boza argues that deportation is part of a "neoliberal cycle" that requires a disposable labor force. In this view, the United States facilitates migration from developing countries to fill low-wage jobs and then uses the threat and practice of deportation to keep this labor force compliant and to remove "surplus labor" during economic downturns. [...] At the state level, the impacts would be most severe in states with large unauthorized populations. A mass deportation policy was projected to reduce California's annual GDP by $103 billion, or about 5 percent. Texas would lose $60 billion, New York "New York (state)") $40 billion, and New Jersey $26 billion annually. ### Households and housing market [edit] [...] ## Economic effects [edit] Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants would have substantial negative effects on the U.S. economy, reducing the national gross domestic product (GDP), decreasing federal tax revenues, and imposing significant social costs on families and communities. Studies project that such a policy would reduce the U.S. labor force by nearly 5 percent, triggering a cascade of economic consequences. ### GDP and federal budget [edit]

• The US Has Deported Immigrants En Masse Before. Here's What ...

  Trump wouldn’t be the first president to round up undocumented immigrants — criminals or otherwise — en masse. He would have to double his deportation numbers from his first presidency to break any kind of record. (More on that later.) But if past removal efforts are any indication, governments don’t need to physically deport masses of people to accomplish their goals of sharply curtailing immigrant populations. Over the years, the biggest “mass deportations” in the U.S. have been, by and large, high-pressure publicity campaigns that stoked such fear among immigrants that they chose to “self-deport.” [...] As history shows us, mass deportations are nothing new in this country. In fact, to accomplish his goal, the president-elect is promising to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law that allows the president to deport non-citizens deemed an enemy of the United States. While on the campaign trail, Trump declared that he would use the law to carry out “Operation Aurora” — arresting and deporting immigrant criminals like the now-infamous Tren de Aragua gang that made headlines in Aurora, Colorado. (Of course, people often forget that immigrants, whether they are undocumented or documented, commit crimes at much lower rates than native-born Americans.) [...] The result: large-scale self-deportation. Many Mexicans, including U.S.-born people of Mexican descent, elected to leave the country. In Los Angeles, by 1935, one-third of its Chicano population had disappeared. Nationwide, it’s estimated that up to 60 percent of those who left were actually American citizens. ## “Operation Wetback” It’s known as the largest mass deportation in American history, and many view it as a model for Trump’s impending immigration plans.

• Mass Deportation of Unauthorized Immigrants: Fiscal and Economic ...

  Brief, Immigration Print to PDF Summary: It is well known that mass deportation reduces aggregate economic variables like GDP due to scale effects. We project that deportation also reduces wages of high-skill workers, compromising 63% of workers. Still, authorized low-skilled workers can see their wages increase but only if the deportation policy is permanently sustained after 4 years. Even with new funds provided in the 2025 OBBBA, we estimate that permanent deportation would cost an additional $900 billion over the first 10 years. Key Points [...] 1. The Census Bureau collects data on foreign-born residents but not their legal status. Estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrants range from 10.5 million to 13 million by other entities, but it could be as high as 15 million. To the extent the actual value exceeds 11.5 million, the budgetary costs of mass deportation will be larger than what we report. However, President Trump has set a goal to deport 1 million per year. As such, our analysis already deports at a slightly larger rate than his stated goal. ↩ [...] Under the 4-year policy scenario, high-skilled wages decrease by 0.5 over time due to a reduction in the number of low-skilled workers that are available to complement the productivity of high-skilled workers as well as a reduction in the size of the capital stock. Wages for authorized low-skilled workers, however, increase by 1.1 percent by the year 2034, but those wages subsequently decline by 0.6 percent by the year 2054 relative to no mass deportations. Intuitively, authorized low-skilled workers eventually face more competition from the slow return of unauthorized low-skilled workers. But the size of the capital stock is smaller in 2054 (Table 4).

• [PDF] The dark, complex history of Trump's model for his mass deportation ...

  it, he said. The record, however, portrays a darker and more complicated picture, suggesting that a mass deportation effort many times larger than any conducted before would be much harder than Trump indicates. The Eisenhower-era operation deported closer to 300,000 people, according to historians, and was accompanied by scores of deaths and shattered families. In some cases, U.S. citizens were apprehended and deported alongside unauthorized immigrants. Raids were concentrated in border communities but stretched as far north as St. Louis. In the pre-civil rights era, few spoke up on behalf of the immigrants, historians say. Some of those apprehended in the raids were allowed to become legal residents by signing up for work programs. Others were sent back to Mexico, often in overcrowded [...] immigrants in the country illegally were deported under the program, many were also granted work permits so they could stay, she said. That's an aspect of the program left out by Trump, who has not proposed increasing opportunities for legal immigration to the U.S. "He doesn't know the full history," said Hernandez, who called Trump's proposal "a fantasy." Like today, U.S. authorities in the early and middle parts of last century faced a conundrum. Farm and business owners demanded cheap labor, and immigrants from Mexico were willing to supply it. But authorities on both sides of the border wanted some semblance of control. Photos of the 1950s mass deportations in Southern California. (Los Angeles Times) They tried to exert it with the Bracero program, a series of agreements between the [...] out across the Southwest, apprehending as many as 3,000 immigrants a day at roadblocks and in raids on homes, farms and factories. Front-page Los Angeles Times headlines from that time touted the operation in demeaning language considered acceptable at the time. "Wetbacks Herded at Nogales Camp," reads one. "U.S. Patrol Halts Border 'Invasion,'" reads another. Veteran farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta remembers the deportation campaign vividly. At the time, she was living in Stockton, where her mother owned a motel. She recalls immigration agents raiding the hotel and the movie theater across the street. "They would show up and check everybody," said Huerta, whose family members were U.S. citizens. "My mom used to say, 'Tell them you need to see a search warrant.'" "It was terrible,"