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The taxpayers of Lane County are paying $215 million to fund the mass deportation of immigrants. It’s a huge number – if we weren’t doing this, every taxpayer in the county could get a refund of $1,600. Or, we could keep teachers in our schools, build public housing and avoid cutting people off Medicaid and food stamps.
Over the past year, we’ve witnessed the specter of masked federal agents in unmarked cars ignoring the civil rights of immigrants and citizens alike, separating children from parents, tearing neighbors and co-workers out of our communities, and sowing fear and intimidation throughout immigrant communities – including citizens and legal residents as well as those undocumented. At first, the government told us deportations were aimed at removing dangerous criminals – “the worst of the worst.” But even the right-wing Cato Institute reports that only 5% of those detained by ICE have ever been convicted of a violent crime.
Until now, the economic cost of deportations has been hidden. But last week, the University of Oregon Labor Education and Research Center, where I work, released a new online tool in partnership with the Economic Policy Institute letting anyone look up how much taxpayers in their town, county or state are paying for deportations.
Anyone who doesn’t believe these numbers is free to look them up on our Cost of Deportations Calculator. All the data is public, how the calculations are made is completely transparent and you can download all the numbers for yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Eugene taxpayers are paying $109 million to fund mass deportations; in Springfield the number is $22.8 million. Any of us could imagine how that money could be better spent. Both Springfield and Eugene were forced to lay off school teachers this year, for instance, and the 4J school district is cutting in half the amount of food provided in breakfasts and lunches for low-income students. None of that would be necessary if we weren’t wasting so much money on ICE.
We could have over 800 more units of public housing in Springfield, and almost 4,000 in Eugene, for the cost of what we’re spending on deportations. Or, across the county, we could keep an additional 10,000 children and elderly people on health insurance. Or we could provide full healthcare for an additional 3,500 veterans. Any of these would be a better use of our tax dollars.
This is not a Republican-versus-Democrat issue. It’s a question of national priorities. We’re living at a time when more and more people are struggling to afford healthcare or housing – and budget cuts are making things worse. Over 1 million veterans lost their healthcare providers in 2025, for instance, because the Veterans’ Administration cut its staff of doctors. And more than 20 million Americans saw their ACA premiums skyrocket this year — making health insurance totally unaffordable for many. But if we hadn’t diverted so much money to mass deportations, we could have paid for those premiums for five years running and still had money left over to keep doctors at the VA.
There are a lot of reasons to oppose mass deportations besides cost. But when we look at the cost, it becomes clear that the policy of mass deportations is not just cruel and not just a threat to civil liberties. It is also the opposite of Putting America First. If Putting America First means anything, it means focusing our limited resources on the things that matter most – the things that make it possible for normal working people to support their families in dignity.
No matter who you’re voting for, we all need to demand that our elected officials make sure no more money is spent on mass deportations until we meet our real needs here at home.
