Congress is supporting Trump’s mass deportation and family separation plans, but at what cost?
Trump’s Mass Deportation And Family Separation:
At What Cost?
Donald Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress are cutting health care, food assistance and other vital services in order to pay for their indiscriminate mass deportations and family separations that are not only cruel but disrupt our economy and raise prices of groceries, health care, and housing for all of us, while making us less safe.
The Trump Administration is diverting DHS resources away from violent criminal and fentanyl traffickers to focus on detaining and deporting law-abiding, working, taxpaying and productive members of our communities who have been in the U.S. for decades.
The Trump Administration’s obsession with immigrants is costly, dangerous, cruel, and chaotic with no regard to our values, public safety or economic concerns.
AT WHAT COST?
Consequences of Health Care Cuts
The Republicans latest budget includes gutting Medicaid to pay for their costly and cruel mass deportation and family separation plans.
Republican lawmakers are proposing more than $880 billion in cuts from Medicaid to help pay to deport law abiding, taxpaying families.
Republican threats to Medicaid put health care at risk for 72 million (21 percent) of Americans including:
- 31.5 million children
- 8.3 million seniors
- 9.1 million people with disabilities
If Republicans decrease federal funding for people in the Medicaid expansion population, it would immediately rip health care away from over 4.2 million Americans across eleven states and jeopardize health care for about 21 million people.
Their plan will create a $50 billion hole in state Medicaid budgets to pay for their health care cuts.
Medicaid is popular
Polling at Caring Across Generations showed 72% of voters have a favorable view of Medicaid. In 2023, 84% of voters, with agreement across party lines, said Congress should place a higher priority on protecting Medicaid from harmful cuts than cut Medicaid to get federal spending under control.
AT WHAT COST?
Consequences of Food Assistance Cuts
Republicans in Washington D.C. want to cut this essential program that feeds our most vulnerable neighbors in order to pay for their cruel deportation policies.
Republicans want to slash $230 billion in SNAP funds, which currently helps feed more than 40 million low-income Americans, including 1 in 5 children.
The Republicans’ budget would take SNAP away from more than 9 million people in an average month. The latest budget proposal would immediately cut benefits for all SNAP participants by an average of $1.40 per day, reducing the daily average benefit to only $5.00 per person. More than 4 million children between the ages of 7 and 17 live in households that would be at risk of losing some amount of food assistance under this proposal.
AT WHAT COST?
Consequences of Mass Deportations on the Economy
Trump’s mass deportation and family separation policies will have broad economic implications for communities across the country, separate families, and devastate industries like agriculture, dairy, and construction.
Mass deportations could cost taxpayers $88 billion annually. By removing millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers, Trump’s deportation plans could reduce the GDP by $1.7 trillion. For every 1 million undocumented workers deported, 88,000 native-born workers would lose their jobs. If DACA ends, the U.S. would lose 18,600 workers per month.
CBS News: How Trump’s plan to deport undocumented immigrants threatens the workforce for U.S. farm workforce:
New Jersey farmer Kurt Alstede: “Anything that happens from a policy standpoint that reduces people in our workforce is gonna make it very difficult for industry and certainly for agriculture … We would be in big trouble if we lost workforce.”
AT WHAT COST?
Consequences of shifting DHS resources
Trump’s mass deportations plans aren’t only cruel and costly, they’re dangerous. By diverting necessary resources away from investigating drug traffickers and international crime organizations, Trump is making America less safe.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered all 6,000 agents from its Homeland Security Investigations agency (HSI) to divert their focus away from drug dealers, terrorists, and human traffickers and toward mass deportations.
Officials warn the shift will “undermine high-profile investigations into some of the most dangerous transnational threats Americans face, including Mexican drug cartels smuggling deadly fentanyl across the border from Mexico.”
According to current and former officials, “The directive could also threaten ongoing investigations and prosecutions, many of which are multi-agency efforts that have been years in the making – like several ongoing cases against the Sinaloa Cartel and other Mexican and Chinese transnational crime syndicates.”
USA TODAY: Thousands of DHS agents shift to deportation instead of drugs, weapons and human trafficking
“Kenneth MacDonald, another former HSI supervisory agent and a former White House official, said other critical threats could go uninvestigated by HSI, which he described as the second largest U.S. federal investigative law enforcement agency after the FBI. Those include child exploitation crimes, cyberattacks and Dark Web financial schemes, Iranian and Chinese nuclear traffickers, Russian organized crime, trade fraud and sanctions investigations.”
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