FACT SHEET: The High Moral Stakes of Mass Detentions and Deportations

Targeting Immigrant Communities with Detention and Deportation

We believe in a moral agenda that stands against systemic racism, labor exploitation, poverty, xenophobia, and any attempt to promote hate towards any members of the human family. The Trump-Republican agenda targets immigrants and their communities, ruthlessly and lawlessly detaining and deporting people of many immigration statuses, and militarizing and terrorizing communities at great cost to us all.

• As of September 2025, there were more than 59,000 people in immigration detention in the United States, up more than 22,000 since last September — a nearly 60 percent increase. Immigration detention hit an all-time high in August 2025, with 61,226 people held in detention.
• Another 181,210 individuals and families were under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) monitoring through means like location trackers on their ankles or wrists. 
• In September 2025, 71.5 percent of current immigration detainees had no criminal conviction. Many of those with convictions were for minor infractions like traffic violations. 
• The largest 17 immigrant detention facilities that hold more than 1,000 immigrants each are all privately operated and stand to profit from mass deportation. A CEO of one private detention company in August praised the “unprecedented growth opportunities” related to Trump-Republican mass deportations.
• The Trump administration is detaining children and plans to open up two more family detention facilities by the end of the year.
• The Trump administration has deported somewhere between 234,000 and 400,000 immigrants as of early October 2025, and claims that its campaigns of threats and harassment have led another 1.6 million people to self-deport.

Abusive Conditions and Violations of Civil and Human Rights

• As of September 2025, 16 immigrants had died in ICE custody this year, including one killed by gunfire outside a detention facility. A second death from that incident brings the total to at least 17. In another incident, a single father of two was shot and killed by ICE during an attempted detention.
• Inhumane and abusive conditions in detention facilities include overcrowding, lack of food, and denial of medical treatment — including for children. 
• In March and April, the Trump administration sent 280 immigrants to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT mega-prison without due process. As of August, 252 of those men had been released and deported to Venezuela, still without due process.
• Amid the changing status of the notorious immigrant detention facility the administration has dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” hundreds of immigrants were moved to undisclosed locations and have been untraceable by family and legal representatives.
• Due to racial profiling and a disregard for legal rights, U.S. citizens are also being wrongly detained.

Weaponizing the U.S. Military Against Immigrants and their Communities

• The administration has deployed military troops, including the National Guard and the Marines, to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. to squash protest, back up heavy police presences, and aid in its mass deportation and detention agenda. 
• More than 2,000 National Guard troops were deployed to Washington, D.C. at an estimated cost of $1 million per day — more than four times the cost of operating enough public housing for all of the city’s unhoused population. The Trump-Republican surge of law enforcement into the city instead dismantled encampments and displaced unhoused people without providing any alternatives.
• As of October 2025, courts have ruled that the deployment of troops to Los Angeles and the federalization of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon for these purposes are not legal.
• Pentagon resources including bases and planes have been used to hold immigrant detainees, transport immigrants for deportation, and provide additional militarization of U.S. cities and the southern border.

Making Legal Immigration Harder

• The Trump administration and the Trump-Republican budget bill have launched multiple attacks on legal immigration, from revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of current residents with Temporary Protected Status to attempting to end the legal refugee and asylum systems and instituting prohibitive fees on legal immigration applications.

Taking from the Poor to Fund Mass Deportation and the Military

• The Trump-Republican budget bill that will take health care and food stamps from millions of Americans and provide more tax breaks for the wealthy also poured $170 billion in new funds into the mass deportation and detention system through September 2029. 
• That $42.5 billion per year in new funding for mass detentions, deportations, and border militarization is the funding equivalent of the 13th largest military in the world. That’s enough to keep Medicaid health insurance for 8.6 million people, or half of those expected to lose health insurance under the Trump-Republican budget.

Raising Inflation and Joblessness and Hurting Us All

• Economists expect mass deportations to reduce overall employment by almost 7 percent. That’s because employers may replace immigrant workers with less labor-intensive technology, or not at all, and because immigrants’ purchasing power also generates jobs. The effects could be felt in service industries, agriculture, and manufacturing.
• Mass deportations could result in spikes in inflation ranging from 1.3 percent to 9 percent, potentially higher than the rate of inflation from 2019-2021 under COVID.
• Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including for Social Security and Medicare, even though they are barred from accessing those programs. Extending legal work authority to undocumented immigrants would raise their tax contributions by $40.2 billion per year in federal, state and local taxes.
• With shortages of essential healthcare personnel, one million immigrants work in essential healthcare jobs. One-third of them are undocumented, and many more hold threatened legal statuses.

Immigrants are our neighbors and strengthen our communities. Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America’s abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us. 

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