When ICE Comes to Town: The Effects of Immigration Enforcement Operations on Local Economic Activity

• In Event: Effects of Aggressive Immigration Enforcement

Abstract

Under Trump 2.0 the U.S. has implemented perhaps the most aggressive immigration enforcement policies in modern U.S. history. These policies shifted enforcement activities from controlling immigration at the nation’s borders to  removing unauthorized immigrants residing in the interior of the U.S. ICE’s methods have also been more aggressive than in previous decades, for example involving traffic stops of anyone suspected because of their ethnicity of being an unauthorized immigrant and then detaining them with little to no regard for due process rights. How have these aggressive immigration enforcement operations affected local labor markets? We estimate the effects of ICE enforcement operations in 2025 on local economic activity, hours worked, missed shifts, and wages using employee-employer and cellphone tracking data from Homebase and Veraset.We consider two designs, which leverage variation in the location, timing, and intensity of enforcement operations: a cross-county design and a within-county design. The former compares trajectories in activity between neighborhoods of affected counties and neighborhoods in nearby unaffected counties, while the latter considers within-county changes in activity leveraging variation in neighborhood demographics. We measure enforcement activity using  ICE arrest , detention and deportation records  that have been de-duplicated and cleaned by  the DeportationDataProject . These data provide arrest records per day as well as the location of the arrest and whether the arrest involved local law enforcement agencies making the arrests and transferring custody of the arrestees to  ICE (“custody arrests”) and those arrested directly by ICE personnel (“community arrests”) without the cooperation of local law enforcements.  Community arrests are more common in blue cities and states and involve the most aggressive methods.Using this data we identify and examine the effects of two surges in ICE activity: Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, IL and Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, MN. We find evidence consistent with the so-called chilling effect:  surges in removal operations---such as Operation Midway Blitz and Operation Metro Surge---led to decreases in economic activity as captured in both data sources.

Author

• Aaron Sojourner, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
  Presenting Author