How Much Does It Cost to Deport 1 Illegal Immigrant

Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia and Jose Escobar visited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices recently for routine appointments.

Both expected to return home afterward to their families in Phoenix and Houston, respectively. Instead, they were detained and deported on the same day, becoming among the first high-profile removals in the wake of President Donald Trump's executive actions on immigration enforcement.

Trump promised during the campaign to deport all 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., but has since narrowed his focus to immigrants with criminal histories, a number many analysts put at about 2 million.

The president, in his revised budget appropriations for fiscal year 2017, asked Congress for an additional $1.15 billion for ICE, to detain, transport and remove undocumented immigrants from the United States. He also asked for $76 million to begin recruiting and hiring some 10,000 ICE agents.

How far would that get Trump toward deporting 2 million immigrants?

Based on current estimates, the additional funds could get Trump about 5 percent of the way to his goal.

There's nothing hard and fast about such estimates. The location, length of detention, country of origin and other factors can significantly add or subtract from the price tag, as the deportations of Fomperosa and Escobar show.

In the case of Fomperosa, his deportation from metro Phoenix involved an overnight stay in detention and a two-hour van ride to his native Mexico. Escobar, meanwhile, spent two weeks in detention in Texas, at an average cost of $180 a day, before being escorted onto a charter flight to El Salvador.

"This (effort to increase deportations) is a major, major task ... and would require a large investment in immigration enforcement," said Ben Gitis, director of Labor Market Policy at the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.

Government figures

ICE spent an average of $10,854 per deportee during the fiscal year that ended in September, according to ICE spokeswoman Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe. "This includes all costs necessary to identify, apprehend, detain, process through immigration court, and remove an alien," she said in an interview.

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Pitts O'Keefe told The Arizona Republic that she was not authorized to provide the methodology used to calculate that number, indicating a public records request would be required. The Republic is pursuing that information.

That figure was a slight decrease from 2011, when Kumar Kibble, deputy director of ICE under former DHS Secretary and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement. He told lawmakers it cost ICE "approximately $12,500 to arrest, detain, and remove an individual from the United States."

Based on the government's most recent estimate, Trump's budget request would cover the cost of deporting nearly 106,000 more people this year. And the supplemental funds he's requested for ICE next year would cover deporting an additional 138,000 undocumented immigrants.

Those dollars would be spread across the entire deportation process: apprehension, detention, court proceedings and removal.

Apprehension costs

Fomperosa and Escobar didn't require a sometimes-expensive effort: immigration officers searching for and arresting people. The men walked into ICE offices and were detained on the spot.

Apprehensions, however, could become one of the biggest expenses if ICE decides to do the work itself as part of a more aggressive deportation policy, said Gitis of the American Action Forum.

In 2015, Gitis conducted a study using data from the government's budget to estimate the costs of deporting all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. The study assumes that about 20 percent of the estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. would leave voluntarily.

The federal government spends on average $4,800 to apprehend an individual, according to his study. That's because ICE relies heavily on local and state agencies to hold unauthorized immigrants who've been arrested for other violations, Gitis said.

That practice has come under scrutiny by "sanctuary cities and counties" that refuse to cooperate with ICE.

If ICE is forced to go at it alone, costs could rise to as much as $27,000 per person, the study concluded.

"These apprehension personnel, they have to investigate," Gitis said. "A lot of undocumented immigrants have been here for decades and are well-integrated into their communities, so I think it would take quite an investigative effort."

Detention is the largest expense

Detention is by far the costliest part of deporting an undocumented immigrant, said David Bier, an immigration policy analyst with the libertarian CATO Institute.

"You have to pay to monitor them around the clock, you have to pay to feed them every single day, you have to tend to their other needs, health and so forth," he said. "So it's an extremely expensive project to detain everybody they arrest."

It costs on average about $180 a day to detain an individual, with the average length of detention at approximately 30 days, according to the government's most recent data. Based on those figures, an average immigration detention costs $5,400.

"The only thing that comes close is the costs of actually hiring the agents to do the arrests," Bier said.

Federal law requires ICE to keep all of its 34,000 detention beds full. Trump's executive order calls for increased detention space on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Bier said the overall costs of deportations decrease over time, once infrastructure has been funded. "The next person in line, it costs less than the first person because you need to build that detention facility, you need to hire those agents to apprehend that person," he said.

In the case of Fomperosa, he spent one day in detention in Eloy; Escobar spent two weeks in the Rio Grande Valley. Both men, however, previously had spent many months in detention, before ICE released them under prosecutorial discretion under the Obama administration.

Court proceedings

Since October, U.S. immigration courts have handled more than 47,500 deportation proceedings, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks immigration data.

Estimates from the American Action Fund study put the average cost to legally process unauthorized immigrants at $1,495 per person. But not all unauthorized immigrants get the chance to argue their case in courts.

Neither Fomperosa nor Escobar faced an immigration judge before their deportations. ICE said Fomparosa had been denied asylum and had a criminal record, making him a priority for removal. Escobar's lawyer said he had a pending deportation order after losing his Temporary Protection Status nearly a decade ago, and had been denied deferred action, or DACA.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in remarks near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, addressed one of the biggest obstacles to deportation: a massive backlog of pending immigration court cases. It stands at over 542,000 cases, with the average wait time up to 677 days, according to TRAC.

Sessions announced plans to hire 124 immigration judges over the next two years, but he offered no details on funding the additional positions.

Analysts dismissed the impact additional judges would have given Sessions' new prosecution guidelines with stiffer penalties for attempted illegal re-entries, which they said would add many new cases to the current backlog.

Transportation

Nogales, Sonora, where ICE repatriated Fomperosa in early March, is a two-hour drive from Eloy.

U.S. authorities deported more than 200,000 people to Mexico using chartered buses to drop off deportees at one of 11 cities on the Mexican side of the border.

Escobar's return to El Salvador, meanwhile, started with a five-hour drive from Houston to south Texas, followed by a charter flight to his native country.

The agency manages ICE Air Operations, with headquarters in Mesa, to transport detainees by charter flights. Unauthorized immigrants caught in the interior of the country are flown to detention centers, and then to their countries of origin, other than Mexico.

A 2015 review by the Office of the Inspector General found nearly half of all flights each year under ICE Air Operations were for transportation within the United States. A quarter of the flights were from the U.S. to Central America's restive Northern Triangle: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The remaining destinations were spread out across South America, the Caribbean and other corners of the globe.

The review placed the average cost of transporting each detainee by charter flight at $490. But it also found that many of the flights, with space for 135 passengers, were filled at below capacity, potentially costing the agency millions of dollars. In response to the report, ICE disputed the use of empty seats as a measure of efficiency, saying costs would rise further by delaying deportation simply to fill seats on charter flights.

ICE said the removal costs in 2016 averaged $1,978 per person, but didn't provide a further breakdown of the expenses.

In recent years, however, the flow of Mexican immigrants has slowed greatly, while the number of Central Americans and migrants from other parts of the world continues to climb. That trend could add significantly to the cost of deportations by forcing the use of more charter flights.

Costs beyond deportation

Whatever the cost of deporting undocumented immigrants, it's a bargain compared with letting them stay in the U.S., said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. The center is a research organization that favors less overall immigration and more immigration enforcement.

According to his calculations, unskilled undocumented immigrants use $74,722 more in public services than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes.

"The bottom line is if the costs are around $10,000 to deport someone … then it looks like a good deal for taxpayers," he said.

Camarota based his calculations on a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report found first-generation immigrants, in general, contribute less in taxes during their working years than native-born U.S. citizens because they are on average less educated and earn less money. However, the report found that reverses around age 60, when native-born U.S. citizens (except children of immigrants) cost the government more per capita because they use more Social Security benefits.

Deportations create other costs that are more difficult to calculate.

Both Escobar and Fomperosa were the main breadwinners for their families. Now, their families left behind in the U.S. must find a way to make ends meet.

Yennifer Sanchez, the eldest of Fomperosa's children, didn't pursue higher education in order to care for her two siblings as her father dealt with immigration issues. She has full custody of them and they live with her in Phoenix.

Meanwhile, Escobar's wife, Rose Marie, said she has struggled greatly since his deportation. She traveled to El Salvador nearly two weeks after his deportation to spend time together and figure out how to bring him back to the U.S.

"It's hard because he's my best friend," she said. "It's not just a husband-and-wife relationship. He is literally my best friend."

She said she has limited support from her mom, but she's looking at other ways to provide for their two children, ages 2 and 7, until Escobar returns to the U.S.

"I'm probably going to get another job ... which is gonna take away all the time away from my kids," Rose Marie said. "Since this happened, I haven't been around my kids a full day."

Republic reporter Daniel Gonzalez contributed to this article.

READ MORE:

Report: ICE falling behind on deportations

Mexico spends heavily to help deported migrants

Report: Immigrants less likely to commit crimes

More ICE, border agents could cost billions

Why didn't deported mom apply for citizenship?

How Much Does It Cost to Deport 1 Illegal Immigrant

Source: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/immigration/2017/04/28/deportation-costs-illegal-immigration/99541736/

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