DHS Says It Costs $18,000 To Deport An Illegal Alien
It’s criminal that taxpayers must foot that bill, but it’s worth every penny.
Vince Coyner | April 18, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
I saw a video yesterday of Markwayne Mullin, the new DHS Secretary, appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show. He stated that it costs more than $18,000 per deportee to remove an illegal from the United States. If you’re thinking that’s because we’re giving them swag bags and first-class tickets home, you’d be wrong. At least that would be fast. No, the $18,000 is what it costs to navigate an illegal through the justice system because activist “judges” make the government jump through a labyrinth of laws and hoops.
Mullins encourages us to imagine the cost of doing that to the twenty million illegals allowed in during the Biden administration. That would be $360 billion! And there would still be another 30 million illegals in the country.
All of this reminded me of a conversation I was having with a young person recently about the cost of illegals to the country. In this case, we were talking about housing. I mentioned that one of the reasons that housing was so expensive is that there are 50 million illegals in the United States. Despite California’s insane Homeless Industrial Complex, most of them are not living on the streets, in California, or anywhere else. They are living in homes.
The population of the United States is approximately 350 million people, who live in approximately 148 million housing units. That is an average of 2.4 people per house or apartment (collectively, “residences”).
Immigrants typically have more people living in their homes—3.5 people per residence. Using that number, the 50 million illegal aliens in the United States live in 14 million residences. If those 50 million illegals were not here, the housing stock available for American citizens and other legal residents would increase by almost 10%. To put that in perspective, on average, the net number of new residences to hit the market each year is about 1.5 million.
Needless to say, if an inventory of 14 million units were freed up over a 3-5 year period, the cost of housing across America would drop significantly. There would, of course, be consequences, given that real estate is a key element of so many Americans’ net worth, particularly older individuals.
That drop in value, though, would be only one of the myriad effects of removing 50 million illegals, most of them good. Others include changes to education, healthcare, welfare, and, of course, criminal justice and jobs.
Let’s take education. On average, schools spend $16,500 per pupil educating their charges. There are approximately five million children of illegal aliens living in the United States and going to school. Five million students times $16,500 equals $80 billion for education. That number is actually conservative because most illegals live in urban areas, where governments spend far more than average on schooling. There’s also the intangible cost of the decline in education because of students who arrive in the schools speaking no English.
FAIR, the Foundation for American Immigration Reform, a relatively anti-illegal immigration organization, estimates that the United States spent $41 billion in 2023 on healthcare for illegal aliens and their children. For some unknown reason, that number is based on the laughably low 15 million illegals. But we’ll keep it to give them the benefit of the doubt. If we multiply it by two ($82 billion), that’s probably still not close to the real cost.
According to CIS, the Center for Immigration Studies, the average number of immigrant families receiving welfare is extraordinary. For perspective, 27% of US-born households receive some form of welfare. Among immigrants, it’s…slightly higher.
Among Afghan families, it’s 87%, Dominican Republic families 78%, Guatemalan 77%, El Salvadoran 75%, Honduran 75%, Ecuadoran 70%, Mexican 67%, etc. As bad as these numbers are, in reality, they understate the problem.
Ostensibly, illegal aliens are not supposed to receive benefits at all, but they do, and do so at higher rates than legal immigrant families. The numbers above are for both legal and illegal immigrants. As such, the above numbers are averages of both and, therefore, are lower than the percentages of illegal alien families on welfare. CIS estimates that, taken together, illegal aliens cost American taxpayers $42 billion annually.
Then there’s crime. Even if one ignores the psychological and physical damage violent crime does to victims, both individuals and businesses, illegal aliens cost Americans tens of billions of dollars per year. FAIR—again using their laughably low numbers—estimates that at the federal level alone, Americans spend $25 billion a year dealing with illegals in the justice system. Elsewhere, FAIR asserts that states spend an additional $22 billion per year dealing with illegal aliens in their respective justice systems.
All of that taken together—$80 billion for education, $41 billion for healthcare, $42 billion for welfare, $47 billion on justice—equals $210 billion per year spent on illegals by American taxpayers. And again, some of those are very low-ball estimates.
The above are explicitly government expenditures. But there are also billions of dollars of additional NGO spending on illegals, although the fact that many NGOs are funded by the government means there’s probably some overlap.
And of course, there are caveats. Some illegal aliens work and pay taxes, which would reduce that number. Schools would be operating in most places even if there were no illegal aliens, so that might reduce that number.
At the same time, most organizations and government agencies have a vested interest in keeping the reported number of illegals far below the actual number. Plus, of course, as stated at the top of this essay, we cannot discount the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of additional housing costs Americans face because there are 50 million illegals competing for the same housing stock.
Assuming we stick with the $210 billion figure and divide it by 50 million illegal aliens in America, that would work out to about $4,200 per illegal alien per year. Compared to Mullin’s $18,000 per illegal deported, it sounds like we would save money by letting them stay. But we wouldn’t, of course. And we shouldn’t. Deportation is a one-time cost. Funding an illegal alien is often a process of years or even an alien’s lifetime.
Given that April 15th was just a few days ago, all of this resonates as one is sitting down to write the IRS a check. And if we had to include in that the impact of illegals on the housing market and wages, it no doubt would be much bigger.
But illegal immigration isn’t just about money. It’s about right and wrong, whether Americans are in control of their own country, and whether our laws mean anything. If we allow some groups to get away with breaking the law with impunity (and benefitting from subsidies, to boot), what message does that send to the rest of the people in America, and more importantly, what message does it send to the rest of the world, particularly the third world, where most illegals come from?
Mullins is right to point out the cost associated with sending illegal aliens home because it’s always helpful for people to visualize where their tax dollars are going and how the out-of-control judicial system is making it worse.
But at the end of the day, illegal immigration is far bigger than just dollars. It’s justice. It’s safety. It’s right and wrong. And sadly, it’s control of Congress! As grifters like Maria Salazar try to pass amnesty by calling it “Dignity,” we shouldn’t let them. She and other Democrats in RINO clothing would replicate Reagan’s worst mistake, on steroids.
Although far too high, that $18,000 is worth every single penny.
