Florida and Texas families are footing the bill for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s radical and extreme mass deportation agenda
Floridians and Texans facing higher costs and one of the worst unemployment dips in the nation don’t have to look far to figure where to put the blame: the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is adding more economic pain for everyday purchases. According to the new “End the ICE Tax” report from America’s Voice, the raid on the wallet is real and quantifiable.
STATES WITH A HIGH IMMIGRANT WORKFORCE FEEL THE PAIN THE MOST
Since last summer through this past June, the five states with the highest immigrant share of their labor force — California, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Florida — saw construction employment fall 1.3%, while the rest of the country saw construction employment grow 3.3% over the same period, the report said.
This means the construction industry is shedding skilled workers at the absolute worst time. The field has already been facing a “significant shortage” since the mid-2000s, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. These costs seep into struggling families’ pockets, with the average cost of building a new home in these states jumping 13.1% — from $304,312 to $344,112 — compared to just 2.0% in the rest of the country.
Florida’s trademark hospitality industry has also been feeling acute pain, with restaurants in Orlando – called the “hospitality capital of the world” by the University of Central Florida – losing an estimated 40% of revenue as immigrant staff members quit out of fear of being swept up and separated from their families, the report said.
Just weeks ago, one local restaurant owner who is himself a Venezuelan immigrant said some 20 federal agents swooped in on his business to abduct nearly one dozen of his workers despite the fact that they held work permits. “The saddest thing is seeing the workers—who become like family—seeing them in handcuffs,” business owner Luis Tarr said in Spanish-language remarks to N+ Univision.
LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AND OFFICIALS ARE COMPLICIT IN RISING PRICES
But blame for the interruption of this business and the upheaval of an untold number of lives doesn’t rest entirely at the feet of the federal government’s anti-immigrant obsessions.
Residents angered over life becoming more and more unaffordable should know that local law enforcement’s choice to collude with ICE has only deepened the crisis unfolding across Florida, which according to the report holds the highest share of 287(g) agreements of any state in the nation. These deeply controversial federal agreements allow local police to be deputized as mass deportation agents and have contributed to heightened arrest figures in the state.
Miami-Dade County, for example, has more pending deportation cases than any jurisdiction in the country, over 146,000 as of August 2025, the report said. “A single six-day operation in May 2025 resulted in more than 1,100 arrests, the largest one-week, single-state immigration operation in ICE’s history.”
Shattered families and community leaders like Tarr are now left paying the price.
IT’S A MESS IN TEXAS
While Texas doesn’t rank alongside Florida and the four other states most reliant on immigrant labor, the kinds of costs described in the report have played out in regions within the state that have been hard-hit by ICE abductions.
“For example, San Antonio — one of 86 U.S. cities where ICE enforcement surged last year — experienced a 462% jump in monthly ICE arrests, which cost the local economy nearly 8,200 jobs, according to Brookings Institution data cited in the report,” the San Antonio Current said in its write-up.
In the Rio Grande Valley, where mass deportation agents have carried out nearly one-fifth of the state’s total abductions, construction jobs fell 5% in the third quarter of 2025, the region’s largest quarterly drop on record, the “End the ICE Tax” report continued. In Laredo, monthly ICE arrests of workers and community members rose from an average of just half a dozen to more than 800 after mass deportation operations began.
“The report also notes that new home prices are rising as construction slows due to a shortage of immigrant labor,” the San Antonio Current highlighted. “What’s more, payroll data across hundreds of U.S. cities found that the 2025 enforcement surge killed roughly 668,000 jobs, with 51,000 to 297,000 of those jobs held by U.S.-born workers.”
“Business is down significantly,” said Ronnie Cavazos, board president of the South Texas Builders Association. “If we continue on this trajectory, we will see a lot of businesses fail.”
The human costs have been devastating enough. In South Texas, Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja still faces unjust expulsion to a country she doesn’t even know after she was abducted by ICE while on her way to Sunday Mass in June. Sister Letty, who belongs to the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy and also serves the Rio Grande Valley as a registered nurse, was detained despite the fact that an immigration judge had previously granted her protection due to fears of persecution in Nigeria.
While she was released later that same day, the administration is reportedly still seeking to deport the Nigeria-born nun to a so-called third-country. Nevertheless, Sister Letty said she can’t remain quiet about her ongoing ordeal.
“There are many others in this same situation,” Sister Letty said during a recent press conference, “people who have been given some form of protection under our laws, who have followed every rule asked of them, and who still live with uncertainty.”
INSTEAD OF DRIVING OUT IMMIGRANTS AND DRIVING UP PRICES, TRUMP SHOULD FOCUS ON THE ECONOMY AND LOWER COSTS
“Instead of working to bring costs down, [the Trump administration has] chosen a deportation machine that terrorizes our communities, guts our industries and sticks every family with the bill,” America’s Voice Chief of Programs Joanna Kuebler said in a statement reported by the San Antonio Current. “It’s time to end the ‘ICE tax’ and put Texas families ahead of a reckless policy that has caused costs to rise.” Same goes for the Sunshine State. “Florida officials have embraced this administration’s mass deportation crusade and Floridians are paying the price,” Kuebler continued.
