ICE Surges Destroyed 668,000 US Jobs, Research Group Finds

A surge in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations under Donald Trump's administration has wiped out an estimated 668,000 jobs across 86 metropolitan areas since January 2025, according to new research by the Brookings Institution published in Washington on Monday.

The study concludes that the ICE surges, introduced on the promise of protecting American workers, have instead undercut local economies and cost jobs for both immigrants and US-born employees.

Trump officials have repeatedly argued that tougher immigration enforcement would free up work for Americans by driving undocumented workers out of the labour market. Since early 2025, ICE has intensified large-scale operations in targeted cities, arresting tens of thousands of people. The Brookings report set out to test whether those crackdowns actually delivered the jobs dividend that the White House has claimed.

They did not, the researchers say. Lead author Marcela Escobari, who heads the Global Economy and Development programme at Brookings, describes the outcome as the opposite of what voters were sold.

'This policy has been framed as a clear benefit for American workers, and for the American economy,' she said. '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.'

How ICE Surges Became A Job-Destruction Machine

The Brookings team, which also included researchers Ian Seyal and Paul Beach, focused on the first nine months of 2025, when ICE ran its most intensive surges. They studied 86 metropolitan areas with the highest levels of enforcement and compared them with 255 other metro areas where ICE activity was far less aggressive over the same period.

Using ICE arrest figures as a proxy for the intensity of enforcement, they calculated that the agency made around 52,000 more arrests in those 86 'surge' cities than in previous years. They then overlaid that with local employment data to estimate how the surges reshaped labour markets.

The core finding is stark. Employment in the high-surge cities fell by an average of 0.73 per cent relative to what it would likely have been without the crackdown, the authors say. Aggregated across all 86 metro areas, that translates to about 668,000 lost jobs.

Between 51,000 and 297,000 of those posts, Brookings estimates, had been held by US-born workers.

That gap between 52,000 excess arrests and 668,000 missing jobs is where the study becomes most politically awkward for the administration. The researchers calculate that each additional ICE arrest in a surge city was associated with the loss of 13 jobs overall. Of those 13, between one and six would previously have gone to an American-born worker.

The report argues that the arrests themselves are only the start of the story. The bigger economic hit comes from what follows: disruption inside firms, fear among workers and a chilling effect on consumer spending as people choose to stay home and keep their heads down.

ICE Surges, Fear And The Wider Economic Shock

Brookings identifies three main channels through which the ICE surges destroyed jobs.

First, many immigrants in high-enforcement areas, regardless of immigration status, simply stopped showing up for work out of fear, according to the study. Some may have gone into hiding, others moved away or dropped out of formal employment altogether. That sudden labour gap, especially in sectors heavily reliant on immigrant workers, left employers scrambling.

Second, those employers could not easily replace missing staff. Hiring and training new workers takes time; not every skill is fungible. Faced with sudden shortages, many firms scaled back operations or shut their doors entirely. That triggered a ripple effect up and down supply chains. A contractor cuts one crew, then delays projects, which hits suppliers, inspectors and office staff. Jobs vanish far beyond the original immigrants targeted.

Third, the report contends that ICE operations reshaped everyday behaviour well beyond workplaces. Raids and arrests, and the fear they generated, deterred people from going out and spending money. Restaurants, shops, cinemas and local attractions saw fewer customers. Lower demand pushed employers in those sectors to trim hours and lay off staff, feeding another round of losses.

The longer the ICE surges went on, the deeper the damage. In 51 of the studied cities where researchers had at least six months of data after a surge began, overall employment losses doubled to 1.48 per cent. In those places, each arrest was associated with roughly 30 lost jobs.

Construction emerged as one of the hardest-hit industries. In those 51 cities, construction employment fell by about 4 per cent after six months, nearly three times the overall average decline, suggesting that the surges did more than remove a handful of undocumented workers. They disrupted entire projects, the authors say, from specialist crews through to project managers and building inspectors, many of whom are American.

The impact did not stop at immigrant-heavy sectors. In arts and entertainment, an industry with fewer immigrant workers, employment in surge cities was still around 7 per cent lower six months on. That pattern supports the Brookings argument that the main driver was a broader economic chill rather than simple one-for-one replacement of migrant workers with US citizens.

Escobari warns against what she calls the 'tempting' but misleading logic behind the ICE surges. 'It's tempting to think of immigration enforcement as a one-to-one replacement,' she said. '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.'

The researchers acknowledge that their estimates may understate the full impact. Their dataset ends in September 2025, yet ICE has continued surging into new metropolitan areas, including Minneapolis, where operations did not begin until December 2025.

They say nationwide ICE-related job losses through June 2026 are therefore likely 'significantly higher' than 668,000, although no updated total has been formally calculated and nothing is confirmed yet, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Trump administration and ICE have not, in the material reviewed for this article, issued a detailed response to the Brookings findings. Without that, one side of the argument rests heavily on economic modelling and the other on political instinct about what sounds tough, and whom it claims to protect.