Since January 2025, the Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement. A key rationale for the policy is that it will open up jobs for Americans by reducing competition from undocumented immigrants.
But does it actually accomplish this goal? A new study from the Brookings Institution has found that the answer is unequivocally no. In fact, the ICE surges are causing significant job losses in cities where ICE is most active. According to the study, ICE operations in the first nine months of 2025 led directly to the loss of at least 668,000 jobs across 86 U.S. metro areas. What’s more, the toll was not limited to immigrants: between 51,000 and 297,000 of the lost jobs were held by American-born workers.
“This policy has been framed as a clear benefit for American workers, and for the American economy,” says Marcela Escobari, the vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings, and the lead author of the study. “But in reality, it’s been the opposite. Our research shows that the ongoing ICE surge has triggered widespread job losses, not only for immigrants but for American-born workers. This damage is measurable, and it’s widening.” She notes that the job losses far exceeded the number of people arrested in the surges, which strongly indicates that ICE’s actions have had a significant ripple effect on employment in the cities where it operates.
The data very likely understate the actual job losses from the administration’s immigration policy. Escobari and her colleagues Ian Seyal and Paul Beach only analyzed the time period from January to September 2025. Since then, ICE has continued to conduct surges, expanding operations into many additional metropolitan areas, including Minneapolis (the surge there didn’t begin until December 2025). As a result, total ICE-related job losses nationwide through June 2026 are probably significantly higher than 668,000.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data from 86 metropolitan areas where ICE had conducted the most widespread surges during the first nine months of 2025. To calculate the intensity of these surges, they analyzed how many people were arrested by ICE over this time in each of these cities. These arrests served as a proxy for the agency’s broader enforcement activities. They then combined this arrest data with employment data from each of the cities. To gauge how much of an effect ICE operations had on job losses, they compared this arrest and employment data with arrest and employment data from 255 U.S. metropolitan areas where ICE surges in the first nine months of 2025 were not as aggressive. These 255 cities served as a control group.
Escobari and her colleagues found that in the 86 surge cities, ICE made around 52,000 more arrests than it had in previous years. Employment in these areas fell by an average of 0.73% from what it would have been without a surge. For all 86 metro areas, this adds up to a total job loss of 668,000.
For the researchers, the most striking feature of the study is the large gap between the number of arrests and the number of jobs lost. They argue that there are three main reasons for the widespread job losses.
-
Regardless of their legal status, many immigrants in high-surge areas stopped reporting to work out of fear.
-
Many businesses can’t easily replace missing workers. Recruiting and training new employees can take time; instead, many businesses scale back or even shut down, creating a ripple effect that costs even more jobs.
-
ICE operations, and the widespread fear they engender, cause people (many of whom may have no direct contact with ICE) to stop going out, and to spend less money. This suppresses demand for goods and services, leading employers to cut back—and thus also costing jobs.
It is important to emphasize that the ICE arrests themselves were not the direct cause of most of these job losses. It was the knock-on effects of the arrests—disruption, fear and reduced consumer spending—that led to most of the losses. For each excess ICE arrest, along with the knock-on effects, 13 jobs were lost in high-surge cities—jobs that had previously been held by both immigrants and American-born workers. The researchers estimate that of those 13 lost jobs, between one and six would have been held by an American-born worker.
Moreover, these job losses worsened over time. In the 51 cities where the researchers were able to observe outcomes at least six months after the surge began, employment losses were twice as high, 1.48% of total workers. In these cities, each arrest, along with the broader disruption, was associated with the loss of 30 jobs.
Some industries were hit especially hard. In those 51 cities, the construction sector, which employs many immigrants, experienced a 4% job loss at six months, almost three times higher than the overall average. This indicates that the surges caused broad disruptions throughout the industry. Enforcement didn’t simply remove workers in proportion to their presence; rather, it disrupted operations in ways that cost additional jobs beyond that. This fits with how the construction industry, as well as many other sectors, typically operates: work is often specialized, and projects are usually interdependent. A framing crew can’t hand off work to a roofing crew if it can’t finish the job because it is suddenly missing half its workers. As a result, job losses ripple outward, hitting project managers, equipment operators, electricians, and building inspectors—roles predominantly filled by American workers.
But the job losses went far beyond immigrant-intensive industries. While sectors with many immigrant workers experienced the deepest direct job losses, industries with very few immigrant workers also contracted sharply in surge cities. The arts and entertainment sector, for example, saw 7% fewer people employed in surge cities six months out. This finding backs up the argument that the job losses were due in large part to the broad chilling effect and the reduction in consumer spending caused by the surges.
“It’s tempting to think of immigration enforcement as a one-to-one replacement,” Escobari says. “One person deported, one job freed up for an American worker. But that’s not backed up by the data. The ICE surges didn’t create jobs for Americans. Instead, they harmed local economies and destroyed jobs, for both immigrants and American-born workers.”