Trump’s Mass Deportation Blitz Is Hurting The Very Workers It Claims To Help

The Trump administration’s aggressive deportation machine has been a central pillar of its immigration policy, with ICE detaining roughly 60,000 undocumented immigrants and deporting somewhere between 350,000 and 605,000 people. The White House claims these raids are a boon for native-born American workers, arguing that cracking down on undocumented labor will create job openings and raise wages for U.S.-born employees. But the first major academic study on the subject, conducted by Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East of the University of Colorado at Boulder, shatters this myth.

Their research shows that the mass deportations have not improved employment outcomes for native-born workers. Instead, they found that labor participation among undocumented workers dropped sharply—not just for those arrested by ICE but also for those who remain, who avoid work out of fear. In sectors heavily reliant on immigrant labor, employment among undocumented workers fell by 3.4 percentage points. Male undocumented workers, who constitute the bulk of those arrested, saw employment fall by 4.6 percentage points and lost two hours of work per week on average.

If you believe that higher unemployment among undocumented workers is a win, then sure, Trump’s policy is a success. But for anyone who thinks government should encourage work, this is a clear failure.

What about native-born workers? The study finds no evidence that Americans are stepping into the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. Instead, native-born workers in immigrant-intensive industries often hold “immigrant-dependent” jobs—positions that rely on a steady supply of lower-skilled undocumented workers below them. When those positions go unfilled, the demand for native-born workers actually decreases.

For native-born workers with a high school degree or less—the group most likely to be “immigrant-adjacent”—employment dropped by 1.3 percent. The study’s stark conclusion: for every six deported male undocumented workers, one male native-born worker loses a job.

Trump’s simplistic theory that deporting undocumented immigrants will open up jobs for Americans ignores the complex realities of the labor market. Even with unemployment at a modest 4.3 percent, native-born workers with similar education levels to undocumented immigrants are losing jobs because the economic ecosystem they depend on is unraveling.

For those who oppose ICE’s harsh tactics on moral grounds, this study adds a new economic argument: no demographic group benefits from Trump’s deportation frenzy. The one group we thought might gain—low-skilled native-born workers—is actually suffering. This inconvenient truth won’t sway Stephen Miller or the White House, but it could be a powerful message for Democrats aiming to challenge this failed policy in the midterms.