Beyond Arrests: How ICE Enforcement Depressed Local Employment in 2025
The administration sold it as a jobs program. Remove the undocumented workers, they said, and the jobs open up for Americans. Clean. Simple. One-for-one.
Reality doesn't work that way.
In the first nine months of 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement made roughly 52,000 excess arrests across 86 American cities. Those are the numbers you see on the news. The handcuffs. The vans. The viral videos.
What you don't see is what happened next.
Employment in those cities fell by 668,000 jobs. That's not a typo. For every single person ICE arrested, thirteen jobs disappeared. The arrests were just the beginning—a spark that ignited something much larger.
The most striking thing about this isn't the scale. It's the gap. The gap between the number of people taken away and the number of people who lost work. That gap tells the real story.
Three forces drove those job losses. Fear kept workers home. Businesses couldn't replace the missing. And consumers stopped spending. Each one fed the others. Together, they depressed local employment far beyond anything the arrest numbers could explain.
Let's walk through how it happened.
The Numbers That Don't Add Up
ICE arrested more people in 2025 than it had in years. The numbers are stark: 365,500 detention book-ins, up nearly 30% from 2024. Deportations hit 320,000, an 18% jump.
But those are just the headline figures. The Brookings Institution dug deeper.
They compared 86 cities that saw sharp increases in ICE activity against 255 cities that didn't. Before the enforcement surge, employment in both sets of cities tracked closely together. Then the arrests intensified. The trajectories diverged.
In the surge cities, employment fell 0.73% below where it would have been without the enforcement. In the 51 cities where researchers could observe outcomes at least six months out, that gap widened to 1.48%.
Those percentages translate to 668,000 jobs. And here's the kicker: between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs would have been held by American-born workers.
The policy was supposed to open jobs for Americans. Instead, it cost them work.
The Chilling Effect: Fear as an Economic Force
ICE didn't need to arrest everyone to make everyone afraid. That's the whole point of "shock and awe".
The administration described its own tactics that way. Highly visible raids. Worksite arrests. Videos of detentions circulating on social media. The message wasn't subtle: we can get you anywhere.
And people believed it.
A 2025 survey found that concern over potential detention jumped from 33% to 50% among lawfully present immigrants. Among naturalized citizens, it rose from 12% to 31%.
Think about that. People with green cards. People who are citizens. They started worrying about being taken away.
One-third of documented immigrants reported avoiding activities outside their homes—including going to work. Not because they were arrested. Because they were afraid of being arrested.
A Chicago waitress named Caridad told NPR she hadn't gone grocery shopping. "What if ICE is there?" she said. "People are more than afraid, they're panicking".
This is the chilling effect. It doesn't show up in arrest statistics. It shows up in empty chairs at restaurant tables. In construction sites with half the usual crew. In factories running at reduced capacity.
The fear ripples outward. A worker stays home. The business loses productivity. The business cuts hours for other workers. Those workers spend less. More businesses feel the pinch. The cycle continues.
When Businesses Can't Replace Workers
Here's something the policy architects didn't account for: you can't just swap in new workers overnight.
When a food processing plant loses a critical mass of its crew, it doesn't pivot seamlessly to a new workforce. It scales back production. It alters operations. Sometimes it shuts down entirely.
The evidence is clear from earlier enforcement periods. In 2019, ICE arrested 680 workers across seven Mississippi poultry plants in a single day. Many people who weren't arrested also lost their jobs. The regional economy suffered for years.
2025 brought more of the same. In Omaha, ICE raided a meatpacking plant and arrested about 70 workers. In the days that followed, many remaining staff stayed home. The plant's output fell by nearly 70%.
Construction got hit especially hard. One in three construction workers in the U.S. is foreign-born. When ICE checkpoints and raids appear, both authorized and unauthorized workers get nervous.
In Charlotte, average monthly ICE arrests jumped from about 31 in 2024 to 160 after March 2025—a more than 400% increase. The region lost an estimated 9,800 jobs.
In South Texas, ICE arrested more than 9,100 people. Construction jobs dropped 5% in the third quarter of 2025—the single largest dip in the region. Builders reported empty job sites. Projects stalled. Work that should have been happening simply wasn't.
A survey by the Associated General Contractors found that 92% of construction firms struggle to fill positions. Twenty-eight percent said they'd been affected by immigration actions. The labor shortage that was already there got worse.
Consumer Spending: The Invisible Drain
When people are afraid to leave their homes, they don't spend money. When they don't spend money, businesses lose revenue. When businesses lose revenue, they cut jobs.
It's not complicated. But the scale is staggering.
In Chicago, researchers used anonymous cellphone GPS data to track movement between immigrant and non-immigrant neighborhoods. The routine back-and-forth collapsed almost immediately after January 20, 2025.
The result: $1.26 billion in lost retail, restaurant, and sales-tax revenue. Retail visits dropped 9%. Restaurant visits dropped 10%. And it didn't recover after a year.
"People's behavior systematically changed after January 20, 2025," said Professor Matt Wilson, a co-author of the study. The city has yet to recover.
Los Angeles saw similar patterns. In neighborhoods with high concentrations of foreign-born residents, spending fell 20-25% in the two months following an ICE enforcement announcement. Businesses near raid sites lost $3.16 million in revenue within two weeks.
Nationwide, the numbers are even bigger. One study found that ICE enforcement caused an estimated 2.9% decline in foot traffic and 6.9% decline in spending—equivalent to 8.1 billion fewer visits and $3.1 to $14 billion in foregone spending.
The effects didn't depend on the demographics of the neighborhoods where stores were located. Local businesses got hurt more than chain stores. Restaurants lost customers. Events got canceled. Retail sales dropped.
This is the part of the story that doesn't make the evening news. No handcuffs. No vans. Just empty tables and quiet cash registers.
Sector by Sector: Who Got Hit
Construction took the deepest direct hit. The sudden disruption of work crews caused project delays, cancellations, and reduced operations. Builders couldn't finish what they'd started.
Accommodation and food services also suffered heavily. Restaurants, hotels, and bars depend on immigrant labor. When workers stop showing up, kitchens can't run. Rooms don't get cleaned. Tables sit empty.
But here's the part that surprises people: industries with very few immigrant workers also contracted sharply. Arts and entertainment. Events. Venues.
This is the spillover effect. When construction workers lose jobs, they stop going to concerts. When restaurant workers get scared, they stop going to the movies. The economic disruption doesn't stay in one sector. It spreads.
The sectors that employ immigrants get hit first. The sectors that serve everyone get hit next. And the sectors that have almost no immigrants at all still feel the pain.
American Workers Didn't Gain
This is the crux of it. The policy was sold as a benefit for American workers. Remove the competition, the thinking went, and Americans get the jobs.
The data says otherwise.
Between 51,000 and 297,000 of the lost jobs would have been held by American-born workers. That's a wide range, but even the low end is significant. And the high end is devastating.
The mechanism is straightforward. When a business loses a critical mass of workers, it doesn't just replace them with Americans. It scales back. It delays projects. It cuts headcount across the board.
Think of it like a chain. Pull one link and the whole thing shifts. The links don't care about immigration status. They just know the chain is weaker.
A 2025 UCLA study found that for every 1,000 immigrants arrested, the employment rate of American-born men in the area fell 0.54%. American workers didn't get the jobs. They lost them.
"The policy has been framed as a clear benefit for American workers," said Marcela Escobari, the lead author of the Brookings study. "But in reality, it's been the opposite".
One Year In: No Recovery
The damage didn't fade.
Eleven months after the surges began, job losses remained 60% higher than at six months. The effects deepened over time rather than dissipating.
By the end of 2025, there were no signs of recovery. The job losses were persistent. The consumer behavior changes were entrenched. The labor shortages were ongoing.
And remember: the Brookings study only analyzed the period from January to September 2025. ICE continued to conduct surges after that, expanding into additional metropolitan areas. The total job losses through 2026 are likely significantly higher than 668,000.
The gap between arrests and job losses didn't shrink. It grew.
The administration's immigration enforcement policy in 2025 was built on a simple idea: remove undocumented workers and create jobs for Americans. The execution was anything but simple.
Fifty-two thousand excess arrests. Six hundred sixty-eight thousand jobs lost. Thirteen jobs per arrest. Those numbers don't add up in the way the policy architects expected. They add up in a different way entirely.
The chilling effect spread fear far beyond the people ICE actually took away. Workers stopped showing up. Businesses couldn't replace them. Consumers stopped spending. The cycle fed itself.
Construction sites went quiet. Restaurants closed early. Retail sales dropped. American workers lost jobs alongside immigrants. The policy backfired on its own stated goal.
What happened in 2025 wasn't a simple transfer of jobs from one group to another. It was a disruption. A shock to the system that rippled through local economies in ways that are still being measured.
The arrests made the news. The job losses made the economy. And the gap between them tells the real story.