What components make up per-deportee cost calculations in 2025 versus 2020 and 2024?
Executive summary
Per-deportee cost calculations are built from a common set of operational line items — arrest, detention/monitoring, legal processing, transportation and removals — but the weight and accounting of those line items changed between 2020, 2024 and 2025 as detention volumes, statutory funding and use of expedited authorities shifted; estimates therefore span from roughly $10–17k per removal on some government tallies to the $30–110k range in academic and advocacy consolidations that average to ~$70k in 2024 dollars [1] [2] [3]. The divergence reflects both real policy-driven cost increases in 2025 (more detention beds, emergency appropriations and expanded enforcement) and methodological choices about which fixed and indirect costs to include [4] [5] [3].
1. The building blocks: the four stages that underlie every per‑deportee calculation
Scholars and policy shops typically break the deportation pipeline into four discrete stages — arresting, detaining (and monitoring), processing (court and administrative adjudication) and removing (transportation and reintegration) — and then allocate direct and indirect costs to each stage to produce a per-deportee figure [3] [6]. Arresting captures law‑enforcement hours and coordination; detention/monitoring covers daily bed costs, medical care and electronic monitoring; processing includes immigration-court backlog impacts and counsel-related costs; removal covers charter flights, repatriation logistics and post‑removal coordination — each item can be counted as variable per person or as a share of fixed infrastructure costs, producing widely different per-deportee numbers [3] [6].
2. 2020: a baseline shaped by smaller-scale enforcement and lower detention accounting
Estimates anchored near 2020 generally show lower per-deportee figures because detention populations and bipartisan enforcement budgets had not yet risen to mid‑decade levels, and government-average figures reported historically low per‑removal costs — for example, ICE reported removals in FY2016 at about $10,900 per deportee, a useful historical comparison point for pre‑2020 practice [1]. The Biden-era 2020–2021 period also featured constrained detention expansion and a court system already stressed with large backlogs, which analysts often treated as preexisting fixed costs and thus kept incremental per‑deportee figures lower [6].
3. 2024: broadening definitions and higher modeled averages
By 2024 advocacy and policy reports began producing substantially higher per‑deportee estimates by folding in broader fiscal impacts — expanded detention capacity, the fiscal effects of lost labor and economic multipliers — and by modeling the administrative scale needed for mass deportations; the American Immigration Council and other analyses included the full chain of costs plus economywide impacts, producing higher per‑person and per‑operation totals that Penn Wharton averaged with other studies to yield roughly $70,236 per deportee in 2024 dollars [7] [3]. Key drivers then were detention and monitoring assumptions (length of stay and daily bed cost), court capacity shortfalls that required large expansions, and transport constraints (limited ICE aircraft) that raised per‑flight marginal costs [3] [8].
4. 2025: spending spikes, emergency funds and the upward pressure on per‑deportee estimates
In 2025, reported cost-per-deportee numbers rose because Congress and the administration increased appropriations and operational tempo: FY2025 appropriations and proposals boosted immigration enforcement budgets and emergency ICE requests signaled overspending pressures, while legislative packages and executive expansion of detention capacity (including multibillion-dollar allocations) raised both variable and fixed components of per‑deportee accounting [5] [4] [9]. Observers note that detention and monitoring remain the largest source of variance — Penn Wharton and press outlets report that actual 2025 per‑deportee costs have in practice exceeded earlier averages and that detention expansion (and use of expedited removal) materially increases per‑person outlays [3] [10] [2].
5. Methodological potholes and the politics of counting
Differences across 2020, 2024 and 2025 estimates stem as much from choices about inclusion (direct operational costs versus economywide and long‑run fiscal impacts) as from genuine cost changes: government averages (e.g., DHS/ICE figures quoted at roughly $17k) measure narrower operational outlays, whereas advocacy and academic reports that count court expansion, macroeconomic losses and repatriation impacts produce far larger per‑deportee numbers [2] [3] [7]. Each source has an agenda — budget offices model fiscal effects conservatively, advocacy groups emphasize broader social and economic harms, and enforcement advocates highlight per‑case operational averages — and those choices explain most of the numerical spread [3] [7] [5].
6. Bottom line: same components, different emphases and a meaningful 2025 upward shift
The components that make up per‑deportee calculations did not change — arrest, detention, processing, removal — but 2024 and especially 2025 estimates put far more weight and dollars into detention capacity, expedited removal logistics, and systemic expansions (courts, flights, contractor beds), producing much larger per‑deportee figures when analysts include fixed-cost amortization and macroeconomic effects; narrower government tallies remain in the low‑to‑mid five‑figure range while consolidated academic/advocacy averages sit near $70k in 2024 dollars, a gap widened by 2025 spending and policy shifts [3] [4] [2].