This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided seven Mississippi food processing plants and arrested 680 workers for immigration violations. The moral cost of these raids to our shared humanity is apparent in stories like that of a tearful 13-year-old boy waving goodbye to his mother or an 11-year old girl pleading for her father’s release. But some people might feel differently, believing such scenes are just the cost of enforcing our immigration laws. If that’s you, I urge you to weigh another cost instead: the sheer financial expense of such cruelty.

First, there’s lost income. ICE was created in 2003 to “protect national security and public safety after 9/11,” but this week’s raids were not about security or safety or terrorism. They targeted immigrants while they worked to support their families and our economy. Many of the arrested individuals now leave behind jobs that won’t be filled and children and spouses who now live without a family member and their associated income. Their communities and local businesses will suffer down the line. And state and local governments will lose the associated tax revenues; undocumented workers pay an estimated $12 billion a year in taxes.

Then there are the costs of enforcement and detention. ICE Acting Director Matt Albence admitted that the raids required a yearlong investigation and 600 agents to execute. The 680 arrested individuals now languish in detention facilities. According to ICE, the average daily cost of detaining one person is $134. Some estimates place the cost at closer to $200 per day. Given this administration’s immigration policies, from family separation to zero tolerance to mass raids, the number of immigrants in detention is rapidly expanding, not retracting. For every person who leaves detention, another replaces them, if not two. Even using ICE’s conservative figure of $134, the cost of keeping one immigrant in detention is almost $50,000 per year. The detention expense alone for the group detained on Wednesday is approximately $100,000 a day, $3 million per month, and $36 million a year. Given that more raids are coming, these costs are only going to go up.

There is yet another cost: Raids add to the immigration court backlog. According to Syracuse University, the number of cases pending in immigration courts is close to 1 million and ballooning by the day. Under the Trump administration, this number has nearly doubled in just 2½ years, and the average wait for an immigration hearing is now more than two years. Detention centers holding people awaiting their time in immigration court have exceeded their capacity, which necessitates the use of private prisons, whose owners made record campaign donations in the past election cycle. Last year alone, taxpayers paid almost $1 billion to the private prison complex for immigration detention. Meanwhile, private prisons have minimal oversight and harsh conditions that resemble slave labor. The result is an increasing number of immigrants caught up in the detention system, a larger immigration court backlog, a financial incentive to keep immigrants in detention longer, and correspondingly higher cost to taxpayers.

The truth is that no government has unlimited resources. When choosing how to spend public funds, we need to weigh costs and benefits. This administration has decided to spend countless time and money arresting nonviolent workers who take care of their families and their communities while spending little or nothing on combating domestic terrorism and white nationalism. CNN reported this week that the Department of Homeland Security sought to increase its focus on domestic terrorism but was rebuffed by the White House. Meanwhile, two gunmen killed 31 people in Dayton and El Paso last weekend — yet another cost of this administration’s immigration policies.

ICE officials are boasting that the workplace raids in Mississippi were the largest in over a decade. That is nothing to brag about. Beyond the countless families and lives torn apart in these operations and mass arrests, the time and financial resources necessary to execute them are wasteful and unnecessary. These raids are merely a show to fire up an anti-immigrant base — and a costly show at that.

Hemanth Gundavaram is co-director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic and teaches immigration law at Northeastern University.

Authors: