Trump Says There Are 25 Million Illegal Immigrants. That Makes Mass Deportation an Even Worse Idea

Vice President J.D. Vance has said the true number of illegal immigrants in the United States is north of 20 million.

President Donald Trump claims it’s over 25 million.

Texas Railroad Commission candidate Bo French put it at 50 million.

Former Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino conjectured that it’s 100 million.

The Migration Policy Institute released its latest estimate of the illegal immigrant population recently, based on Census Bureau data, finding that it grew to 15.8 million in 2024.

Why did Vance, Trump, French and Bovino feel the need to inflate the count so grossly? Politics. These officials seem to think that the greater the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States, the more urgent the need for mass deportation.

In fact, it’s the opposite: the higher the number, the worse the idea of mass deportation becomes. MPI’s estimate is the most rigorous yet, but if these officials are right about the true number, mass deportation’s fiscal cost, economic damage, social carnage and threat to our freedom would be far greater than we think. 

The math is simple. The more illegal immigrants, the more Americans would have to pay to deport them. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a single deportation costs on average $18,245. This means that when Trump invents the presence of 10 million more immigrants, he’s adding a theoretical $182.4 billion to the price tag. 

And that’s just the cost of deportation. The cost to federal revenue is even starker. Illegal immigrants pay sales tax — and, often, Social Security tax, income tax and property tax. The more illegal immigrants we deport, the more the cost of funding government would shift to American citizens and legal residents. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that recent illegal immigrant arrivals would have cut deficits by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, and found that Trump’s crackdown in 2025 had already erased $500 billion of those savings. 

Illegal immigrants receive very few taxpayer benefits because they are ineligible for all the largest federal public benefit programs, and most states also restrict eligibility for smaller state programs. Since the benefits being paid are a known quantity, a larger illegal immigrant population suggests that the cost per immigrant is actually far lower than we think. 

But the taxpayer expenses are dwarfed by the broader economic impact: less stuff produced for the American people. The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that just 8.3 million deportations would leave U.S. gross domestic product 7.4% lower than otherwise by 2028, the equivalent of about $2.5 trillion. Lower output means fewer goods and services — everything from food to childcare — for Americans.

If the Trump administration’s hyperinflated figures were true, it would also suggest that illegal immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than we thought. Using a far lower estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the country, scholars had already calculated that, compared to native-born Americans, illegal immigrants were far less likely to be incarcerated. But again, since we know who is in prison, if the free immigrant population were to grow, the immigrant incarceration rate would fall in turn. 

In other words, the Trump administration apparently believes that illegal immigrants are far less represented in the crime data than anyone else. Of course, the rate of crime — not the absolute number of crimes — is what matters, because the rate is how we estimate the likelihood that someone will become a victim of a crime. More immigrants would mean a much lower victimization rate — that the presence of illegal immigrants reduces the likelihood that Americans will be victimized.

Finally, the more deportations required for mass deportation, the more the campaign will violently intrude into the lives of Americans. According to the best estimates, about 12 million Americans, including 1.2 million spouses, lived with illegal immigrants. If these estimates are actually low, then many more Americans will end up losing their families or be forced to leave the United States along with them.

For some, the rule of law alone justifies mass deportation, since deportations will stop legal violations. But DHS has yet to hit even 1 million deportations, and self-deportations don’t substantially change the picture. If the true illegal population were 26 million rather than 16 million, a policy of mass deportations would mean we’re decades further from resolving the problem.

A much more sensible approach is to fix the legal immigration system. Then just let the illegal immigrant population apply for legal status through that system. Immigrants came illegally precisely because the current system provides no viable path to immigrate legally. A better system would restore the rule of law without all the pointless costs of mass deportation and prevent the situation from repeating.