Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
The Trump administration’s campaign of detentions and deportations not only separates families and claims lives. It also reduces the labor force in key economic sectors and drives up prices for goods and services—a quantifiable effect that a new report from America’s Voice describes as “the ICE tax.”
According to the report, “prices are rising fastest in the categories that depend most on immigrant labor.”
The report is based on an analysis by economists Robert Lynch and Michael Ettlinger of Economic Insights and Research Consulting of the Consumer Price Index, which found that “over the twelve months ending in June 2026, while core prices (excluding food and energy) rose 2.6 percent, immigrant-labor-intensive goods and services ran well above that.”
The increases ranged from 6.3% to 32.1%. For example, “lettuce up 32.1 percent, canned fruit 7.9 percent, fresh citrus 6.3 percent, apples 7.1 percent, home health care 10.7 percent, landscaping 10.8 percent, and whole milk 9.0 percent.”
Since Trump began his second term, he has intensified a violent campaign of immigration enforcement. This has been reducing the immigrant working-class population—and, consequently, the U.S. workforce—through deportations, self-deportations, the mass revocation of work permits (for example, for recipients of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS), and other initiatives aimed at curbing both authorized and undocumented immigration.
This, in turn, impacts sectors of the economy that rely on immigrant and undocumented labor. In agriculture, 68% of workers are immigrants, 42% of whom are undocumented. 39.8% of in-home caregivers are immigrants—approximately 220,000—and in landscaping, 39% of workers are immigrants, 24% of whom are undocumented.
Another sector that has been affected is construction, where 26% of workers are immigrants and half of those are undocumented.
According to the America’s Voice report, “construction is slowing, and new homes cost more, exactly where immigrant labor is most scarce.”
“The states and regions most reliant on immigrant construction workers are seeing employment declines, falling housing permits, and rising new-home prices, while less-reliant regions see growth,” the report adds.
For example, in the West, where 25% of the workforce is made up of immigrants, the price of new homes rose by 8.2%. And in the Northeast, where 23% of the workforce is of foreign origin, the price of new homes rose by 15.4%. But in the South and the Midwest, where the workforce includes fewer immigrants, new home prices remained stable.
Jobs held by Americans are also being lost because enforcement operations reduce economic activity in companies and businesses, leading to layoffs, job cuts, and wage reductions.
According to the report, “an analysis of payroll data across hundreds of U.S. cities found that the 2025 enforcement surge cost an estimated 668,000 jobs lost, with a conservative-to-upper-bound estimate of 51,000 to 297,000 of those jobs held by American-born workers.”
“Where ICE goes, local economies contract for everyone. A study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania matching thousands of ICE operations to real-time foot-traffic and spending data across millions of businesses finds that after enforcement moves into a metro area, consumer spending runs 6.2 percent below normal and foot traffic 2.7 percent below normal at the average business, week after week”, the report adds.
“Extended across the economy, that means roughly 8.1 billion fewer customer visits and $3 to $14 billion in foregone spending in a single year.” And, according to the analysis, the damage falls hardest on small, independent businesses.”
In short, Trump’s campaign of arrests and deportations has reduced the U.S. workforce under the false premise that they are removing criminals. Still, these are workers in essential sectors, and their absence causes prices for goods and services to skyrocket. It is the ICE tax that we all pay.
The original Spanish version is here.
