The Trump administration's sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants last year shrank local economies across the United States and erased nearly 670,000 jobs, according to a new study.
The Brookings Institution, a US think tank, said in a recent report that the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations under the Trump administration triggered a broad contraction in local economies, resulting in a total loss of 668,000 jobs.
Researchers analyzed 86 cities where ICE arrests surged and found that each arrest was associated with an average loss of 13 jobs. The damage was particularly severe in the construction industry, which relies heavily on immigrant labor, but the employment decline was not limited to construction. Jobs were also significantly cut in arts and entertainment sectors, where immigrants make up a smaller share of the workforce.
As ICE conducted large-scale operations, residents went out less and spent less, prompting businesses to scale back hiring, the researchers said. They explained that the enforcement campaign — unprecedented in scope and spreading fear throughout entire communities — caused local economies as a whole to contract.
The job losses are also hurting Americans. Researchers found that businesses dependent on immigrant labor faced sudden worker shortages, leading to a broader downsizing that affected American workers as well. Of the 668,000 jobs lost, as many as 297,000 had been held by US-born workers, the report said.
According to the report, consumer spending in immigrant-dense neighborhoods of Los Angeles fell by as much as 25 percent in the two months following ICE operations. "If the goal of cracking down on undocumented immigrants is to protect American workers and strengthen the resilience of local economies, large-scale enforcement is not only costly but can actually be counterproductive," the Brookings Institution said.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, public backlash has grown amid continued aggressive ICE operations against immigrants. The controversy over excessive enforcement intensified in January, when two US citizens were killed in succession by ICE agents in shootings in Minneapolis.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pledged to deport one million undocumented immigrants per year. ICE agents subsequently launched indiscriminate sweeps to meet quotas. The New York Times reported that ICE made roughly 150,000 "indiscriminate arrests" last year, more than four times the figure from the previous year.
