Posted on Monday, November 25, 2024

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by Outside Contributor

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With President Trump poised to fulfil his campaign promise to execute the “largest deportation operation in American history,” open-border advocates are looking to undermine him. The latest straw they’ve grasped on to is the claim that it would cost the U.S government $88 billion per year to arrest, detain, process, and remove one million removable aliens.

This is a wrong-headed approach for two reasons.

First and foremost, you can’t put a price on the safety and well-being of the American people. The Left’s attempt to make deportation about money shows how out of touch they are, which is one of the reasons they were beaten so handily by President Trump earlier this month.

The second reason is that any serious discussion about the monetary cost of deportation must be had in the context of the cost of mass migration, and that’s not something the Left wants to talk about.

Let me explain. While the Left’s $88 billion figure is merely an estimate, the Right can point to billions and billions of dollars that the Biden-Harris administration has already spent to entice and resettle migrants and give them handouts. States and localities, who are shouldering the bulk of the burden of the open-borders status quo, are also suffering.

Consider, for example, that, from fiscal year 2021 through FY2024, the State Department received approximately $22 billion for migration and refugee assistance.

These funds were used to: address mass migration operations abroad; deal with the fall-out from the reckless Afghanistan withdrawal, including bringing unvetted Afghans directly to the U.S.; resettle Ukrainians in the U.S.; build processing centers (“Safe Mobility Offices”) in Central America to process and facilitate mass migration to the U.S.; and pay the likes of UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration, and other NGOs, which similarly have facilitated mass migration to the U.S., including by giving pre-paid debit cards to migrants in Central America.

Or consider that, from FY2021-FY2024, Congress funded the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) approximately $31 billion to provide “culturally and linguistically appropriate services, including ‘wrap-around’ services,” such as housing, medical, and legal services, for aliens and unaccompanied alien children. Indeed, during the Biden administration, a historic 535,000 unaccompanied children were enticed to cross the border by the statutory promise of immigration benefits and impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ public statements that unaccompanied children would not be turned away.  

The result was disastrous. As reported in the New York Times, HHS farmed these children out to unvetted sponsors. Today, HHS has reported that it has lost touch with over 300,000 unaccompanied children.  

Or consider that, from FY2021-FY2024, FEMA—an agency designed to help American citizens suffering from natural disasters—received $2.2 billion for shelter and other services for inadmissible aliens.

The above $55 billion dollars are only a subset of the unknown total spent on Biden-Harris’ open border agenda. There are countless other examples. Numerous other programmes, agencies, and funds contributed money to the administration’s opaque open borders operations. To put it simply, the Biden-Harris administration has been awash in money and used it to achieve terrible results for America.

States and localities have also paid dearly to provide shelter, food, medical care, public education, and welfare for the millions who unlawfully entered the US these past four years. New York City has spent over $5.5 billion during this crisis. Massachusetts has already spent $1 billion on housing illegal aliens and is expected to pay another $1.8 billion through 2026. Denver spent $340 million over 18 months.

These numbers are repeated across the country. And each year these millions of inadmissible aliens stay in the U.S., these costs multiply. Of course, the value of American lives lost to fentanyl poisoning, criminal aliens, and gang members let into the country cannot be quantified.  

As President Trump’s team fulfils his promise to the American people in the coming days and months, the open-borders Left will make every argument it can to stop them. But in every case, those arguments will fail. Mass deportation is fiscally responsible, morally just, and politically popular. It is time to give the American people what they want and deserve.

Lora Ries is Director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Reprinted with Permission from Heritage.org – By Lora Ries

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.