The Trump administration’s immigration surge into US cities last year resulted in 668,000 job losses, creating a “chilling effect” that pervaded local economies, hurt businesses and affected American-born workers, according to a report from the Brookings Institution.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement campaign adopted “shock and awe” tactics that were broader and far more visible than previous enforcement efforts, including one started under former President George W. Bush in 2008 and continued under former President Barack Obama, said the authors of study, released Friday.
In the 86 cities that saw the sharpest rise in ICE arrests, they found roughly 13 lost jobs associated with each excess arrest. Industries that traditionally employ a large share of undocumented migrants, like construction, saw the biggest impact. But employment in sectors like arts and entertainment, where few immigrants work, also fell sharply. The authors said that’s because businesses cut staff as people stop going out when ICE raids dominate the news.
“Enforcement at this scale and speed — visible, shocking, designed to produce fear beyond the directly targeted population — destroys jobs, disrupts businesses that Americans own and run, and depresses the local economies in which Americans live and work,” Marcela Escobari, Ian Seyal and Paul Beach wrote in the report.
The White House didn’t immediately return a request for comment on the report.
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The study looked at 86 cities that experienced an enforcement surge in the first half of 2025 and compared them with others that didn’t to help isolate the impact from other factors that affect local employment. The authors used arrest data from the Deportation Data Project, an initiative that tracks ICE arrests through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as employment estimates from labor market research firm Lightcast and federal payroll records.
Of the 668,000 estimated jobs lost in those 86 cities, between 51,000 and 297,000 would have been held by American-born workers, the study estimated. Businesses that rely partly on immigrant workers suddenly found themselves short of labor and scaled back operations for everyone, including US-born employees, according to the report.
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Meantime, consumer spending fell in immigrant-heavy communities. The authors cite a study from earlier this year that suggested spending in Los Angeles neighborhoods with high levels of foreign-born residents slipped as much as 25% in the two months following the announcement of a local ICE campaign.
“If the objective is to protect American workers and support resilient local economies, a wide-scale, “shock and awe” enforcement approach in American cities is a costly and counterproductive tool,” the authors wrote.
