How do state and local costs for detaining or supporting deportation of unauthorized immigrants compare to federal spending 2020–2025?
Executive summary
From the available reporting, federal spending on immigration enforcement and deportation from 2020–2025 dwarfs the direct costs borne by state and local governments: federal outlays have surged into the tens and hundreds of billions through baseline DHS budgets and the 2025 reconciliation packages, while the Congressional Budget Office estimated state and local incarceration costs tied to the 2021–2023 surge at roughly $0.77 billion in 2023 [1] [2] [3]. State and local fiscal exposure is concentrated, limited, and often offset by federal reimbursements or incentives, but large new federal enforcement packages could shift more costs and obligations onto local jurisdictions through conditional funding and programmatic ties [4] [5].
1. Federal spending: large, fast-growing, and increasingly concentrated on detention and deportation
Federal enforcement budgets have expanded markedly: ICE’s budget grew from roughly $3.3 billion historically to $9.6 billion in FY2024 and DHS enforcement agencies account for many billions more, with advocacy groups calculating cumulative federal spending of hundreds of billions since DHS’s creation [2]. In 2025 Congress and the administration moved to scale enforcement dramatically via reconciliation measures that advocates and analysts describe as unprecedented—packages and laws reported to allocate roughly $170 billion for enhanced border security, detention, and deportation, including $45 billion to build detention capacity and multibillion-dollar annual increases in ICE detention funding [6] [7] [4] [8].
2. State and local direct costs: measurable but small in aggregate compared with federal outlays
The CBO’s focused estimate of how the 2021 surge affected state and local budgets found spending for incarceration of members of the surge population totaled about $0.77 billion in 2023—an explicit, bottom-up figure that excludes federal detention and most federal immigration costs and thus represents the narrow set of state/local criminal-incarceration costs tied to the surge [1]. Other state and local obligations—public schooling, health services, emergency care, and local law enforcement—are harder to isolate; some reports try to aggregate such costs to produce much larger state/local totals, but those estimates rely on broader assumptions and vary widely by source [9].
3. Reimbursements and incentives blur the line between federal and local fiscal responsibility
Several 2025 funding measures include direct reimbursements or grants to states and counties for immigration-related costs—reports cite figures like $3.5 billion in reimbursements to states and localities and other programs that pay jurisdictions cooperating with federal enforcement [4] [6]. These provisions mean that while the federal government is paying the headline costs, it is also using conditional money to shape local practices, creating implicit fiscal incentives that can increase local involvement in enforcement even when federal dollars offset some immediate expenditures [5].
4. Alternative estimates and political framing: large disagreements about net fiscal effects
Policy groups offer sharply different framings: FAIR published a high estimate of fiscal burdens—citing up to $151 billion annually as of 2022—while research from academic and policy shops (Penn Wharton, American Immigration Council, Brookings) emphasizes federal costs of enforcement and the lost tax contributions of undocumented workers in counterfactual deportation scenarios [9] [3] [10] [11]. These divergent estimates reflect differing definitions (direct costs versus broader service usage), time windows, and partisan assumptions; they underscore that state/local burdens look much smaller when measured with the narrow CBO approach than when advocacy groups aggregate public-service costs.
5. Bottom line and limits of the record through 2025
Measured narrowly, state and local direct incarceration spending tied to the surge was modest—about $0.77 billion in 2023—while federal enforcement budgets and new 2025 packages amount to tens or hundreds of billions, including multi‑billion expansions for ICE detention and deportation operations [1] [2] [3] [7]. However, federal reimbursements and programs that condition funding on local cooperation, plus wide methodological disagreements among analysts, mean total fiscal interactions are complex: states may avoid some direct costs through federal funding, yet still shoulder indirect economic and social effects that are not fully captured in the narrow CBO number [4] [5]. The sources do not provide a single, reconciled dollar figure for all state/local spending 2020–2025 across every category—only targeted estimates and large federal budget totals—so any precise cross‑level comparison beyond these documented figures requires additional, harmonized accounting that is not present in the available reporting [1] [2] [6].