Overview
- This week the Economic Policy Institute published an interactive calculator that totals $268.9 billion in projected deportation spending and divides that sum into an average burden of about $2,358 per U.S. taxpayer.
- EPI converts the total into alternative uses and finds the money could fund more than 118 million extra SNAP recipients, nearly 12 million more people on Medicaid, or housing for roughly 9.7 million households over the same period.
- The institute apportioned costs to states and local areas by each area’s share of federal income taxes, producing wide variation in per‑taxpayer estimates such as roughly $3,930 for D.C. and about $1,297 for West Virginia.
- The Department of Homeland Security and the White House have formally rejected EPI’s framing, arguing the analysis omits costs of illegal immigration and asserting lower per‑person costs for voluntary departures—DHS provided about $5,100 per voluntary participant and has previously cited roughly $18,000 per non‑voluntary deportation.
- Actual spending will depend on congressional appropriations and program design, a choice that could reallocate federal funds from domestic programs to enforcement and change the budgetary burden on taxpayers and communities.