Donald Trump’s immigration plan is huge in every aspect — including its price tag.

Think $166 billion. And that’s on the low end.


The Republican business mogul is turbocharging his tough-on-illegal-immigration reputation that he’s used to ride to the top of the GOP presidential polls by pushing to deport everyone here illegally, ramping up immigration enforcement and even calling for an end to birthright citizenship. He’s managed in the process to pull the GOP field to the right on an issue that could be critical in the general election — and cause plenty of heartburn for party bosses still experiencing flashbacks from Mitt Romney damaging call for “self-deportation” in 2012.

“As far as immigration’s concerned, we need the wall,” Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, the same day he unveiled his proposal on his website. “We want people to come in. I want people to come in. They have to be wonderful people. They have to come in legally.”

But Trump has said little about how much his plan would cost or how he’d pay for it, other than a dubious assurance he’d make Mexico foot the bill for the wall.

So with help from experts at groups spanning the political spectrum — the National Immigration Forum, the Center for American Progress, the Migration Policy Institute, the Cato Institute and the American Action Forum — POLITICO rang up the cost of key provisions in Trump’s immigration proposal. Here’s how it breaks down.

Mass deportation: $141.3 billion

While it’s not explicitly outlined in Trump’s six-page immigration proposal, he has repeatedly pushed for deporting all 11 million immigrants here illegally — and then letting the “good ones” come back. (Trump’s plan does call for “mandatory return of all criminal aliens,” but that could mean both legal and illegal immigrants.)

In January 2011, Kumar Kibble — then the deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — told lawmakers that it costs about $12,500 to deport one immigrant from the United States. Multiply that by 11.3 million — the size of the undocumented population in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center — and you get $141.3 billion.

The liberal Center for American Progress pegs the per-person rate a little lower, at $10,070 – giving Trump’s deportation plan a bit of a discount, at $114 billion.

But there are bigger enforcement costs to consider beyond actual deportation. In a March report, the American Action Forum projected that it would cost $419.6 billion to $619.4 billion to deport everyone here illegally — tallying not just the price for removing one person, but the enforcement costs to prevent future illegal immigration. And deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants would take about two decades, according to the AAF.

“Many of these individuals have been here a long time … it’s not that easy to identify them,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the conservative think tank’s president and a longtime adviser to Republicans. “Even if they were easily identifiable, you have to somehow detain them and that requires literally boots on the ground. And you have to process them, and that requires administrative judges and hearings and time … and then you have to deport them.”

Triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers: $8.4 billion per year

In order to deport everyone here illegally, a Trump administration would need to beef up its immigration enforcement team. Trump proposes to do just that by tripling the number of ICE officers charged with rooting out those without papers (about 5,000 at current count, according to Chris Crane, head of the ICE officers’ union).

In fiscal 2014, the federal government spent about $2.79 billion for detention and removal operations, so a force three times the current size would cost about $8.4 billion per year.

Trump says he’d pay for this by revoking some tax credit payments that are funneled to immigrants here illegally — a proposal that’s been floated before by congressional Republicans.

Walling off the southern border: At least $5.1 billion, plus annual maintenance

Another expensive plank in Trump’s immigration plan is building an impenetrable “permanent border wall” along the southern border — and making Mexico pay for it.

Setting aside the unlikely scenario that Mexico would actually cough up the money for a wall (the government has already shot down that idea), estimates show that it would cost at least $5 billion to finish building the fence that already runs along parts of the southern border.

Those estimates come from a 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office, which found that it costs an average of $3.9 million to build one mile of fencing. About 670 miles of fencing is already up along the 1,989-mile southern border, so finishing the fence that’s already there would cost about $5.1 billion.

But the actual cost is likely much higher, according to experts. The vast majority of the existing border fence is single-layer fencing near urban areas, which is considerably easier to build. Much of the remaining 1,300 miles runs through rough terrains and remote areas without roads, so it’s fair to assume the per-mile cost of finishing the fence would be on the higher end of the GAO’s estimates, which was $15.1 million per mile.

Immigration experts also say because much of the property on the southern border is private, Trump would have to consider the additional cost of seizing the land to build his wall.

On top of the actual construction, the feds would have to set aside money to maintain it.

In this year’s budget request, the Obama administration asked for $274 million to maintain the fence that’s already there. Upkeep for a fence that’s nearly three times longer would cost at least $750 million per year, assuming that a Trump administration wants to make sure its fence is in tip-top shape.

Trump insists his border wall would be “under budget and ahead of schedule.”

“And nobody’s getting through that wall,” Trump told “Meet the Press.” “Believe me.”

Nationwide E-Verify system: $2.15 billion

Though Trump’s immigration plan is filled with controversial — and somewhat questionable — provisions, his call for a nationwide E-Verify system isn’t one.

E-Verify allows employers to check electronically whether workers are in the country legally, and it’s a popular tenet of essentially any immigration reform proposal. The Senate “Gang of Eight” bipartisan immigration bill — co-written by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Trump opponent for the GOP presidential nomination — would have required that all employers use E-Verify within five years.

The Gang of Eight’s E-Verify plan would cost about $750 million to make the system mandatory nationwide (right now, it’s only voluntary) and then another $1.4 billion to implement the new system, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That would equal a $2.15 billion price tag, if Trump were to take an E-Verify plan similar to one written by a rival. The Cato Institute also estimates that implementing E-Verify would cost $2.3 billion over 10 years.

But Trump could find cheaper E-Verify plans by shopping around. For example, an E-Verify bill that passed the House Judiciary Committee in June 2013 would cost about $1.3 billion over a decade, according to the CBO.

Visa-tracking system: $7 billion

This is another provision in Trump’s plan with bipartisan support.

In his six-page proposal, Trump calls for increased penalties for visa overstays and adds that the government should also finish a visa-tracking system — presumably a biometric exit-entry system that takes foreigners’ fingerprints as they enter and leave the United States.

The U.S. government already has a system in place that collects fingerprints of foreigners entering the country. But it’s the “exit” part of an exit-entry system that’s long stymied government officials because of bureaucratic and logistical hurdles.

The Los Angeles Times estimated in July 2013 that a new system tracking foreigners who exit the country would cost more than $7 billion. That provision was part of the so-called border surge in the Gang of Eight bill, which would have required the new biometric exit-system to be installed at the nation’s biggest airports within six years.

A biometric exit-system is a popular idea among lawmakers because an estimated 40 percent of the current undocumented population did not arrive in the United States illegally, but came on a temporary visa. A system that records when foreigners leave the United States would help better track visa overstays.

Mandatory detention: $1.7 billion per year

In Trump’s immigration proposal, all immigrants caught trying to cross the border illegally would be detained.

“Illegal aliens apprehended crossing the border must be detained until they are sent home, no more catch-and-release,” the billionaire proclaimed in his six-page plan. But a Trump administration will have to be ready to dole out considerable cash to do that.

Border patrol agents apprehended 486,651 immigrants at the border in fiscal 2014, with the vast majority — 479,371 — caught at the U.S.-Mexico boundary. It costs $123.54 per day to detain an adult, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and an immigrant in detention stays in custody for an average of 29.4 days.

So assuming that all immigrants caught at the border are detained about 29 days, the cost of doing so would be about $1.7 billion annually.

But according to Marc Rosenblum, director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, the actual price tag is likely to be higher since about 107,000 of those apprehended in 2014 were juveniles and the cost of detaining them is much higher.

Despite the high dollar figure for Trump’s ideas, advocates for stricter immigration policies say it’s a worthy expense.

“Controlling immigration is a core function of the state unlike, say, farm subsidies,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, “and consistent enforcement would also save money by reducing use of taxpayer-funded programs.”

Economic costs?

The $166 billion price tag from POLITICO’s analysis tallied up the actual price tag for Trump’s plan. But those costs don’t even begin to calculate the hit to the economy Trump’s proposal would cause, pro-immigration experts say.

Trump’s proposal includes a wealth of ideas meant to restrict the flow of legal immigrants into the United States — such as a “pause” before new green cards are issued to workers and “control” of the number of low-skilled employees admitted to the country. That may get applause among many conservatives, but experts have long said reducing immigration would diminish the labor pool and ultimately hurt the economy.

“In the absence of immigration, we shrink,” Holtz-Eakin said. “If you do smart immigration reform, you basically get to pick your future — future labor force, future population. And that’s a big economic advantage.”