New report explains how mass deportation is driving up prices for American consumers
Working Americans are being forced to pay more for everyday essentials like fresh fruit and vegetables, mom and pop shops have seen thousands of fewer customers, and local economies are contracting as a result of the Trump administration’s mass deportation obsessions, says a new report from America’s Voice.
“Groceries cost too much. Daycare costs too much. Taking care of an aging parent, building a house — all of it costs more than it should,” says the “End the ICE Tax” report. “There are a lot of reasons for that. But one of them is a decision the government is making right now: its mass deportation agenda is contributing to an increase in prices and depressing economic activity.” We have seen this agenda target the skilled farmworkers who feed us, the expert laborers who build our homes, and the essential healthcare professionals who heal us.
This only hurts our communities – and our wallets. These additional costs are showing up “at every kitchen table in the country, including the tables of families who’ve never thought twice about immigration,” the report notes.
GROCERIES THAT DEPEND ON IMMIGRANT LABOR ARE RISING FASTEST
When 68% of the farmworkers who harvest our food are foreign-born and 42% of those laborers lack legal immigration status, it’s no shock that the administration’s mass deportation obsessions are driving up food costs for all of us. “The fruits, vegetables, and dairy products most produced in the United States by these workers have seen price increases substantially above the 2.6 percent core inflation rate,” the report said:
- Apples are up 7.1%, about 90% grown domestically. Fresh citrus is up 6.3%, about 75% grown domestically. Canned fruit is up 7.9% and canned vegetables 3.5%, roughly 60% and 90% of each, respectively, produced domestically.
- Fresh whole milk is up 9.0% and other fresh milk is up 5.5%, with 95%of each produced domestically.
- Lettuce is up a whopping 32.1%, with about 85% of it grown domestically.
Compounding the skyrocketing price of lettuce is the unprecedented cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce sourced by Taylor Farms. While this deadly outbreak has so far been tied to lettuce grown in Mexico, some U.S.-based farmers have been forced to destroy their crops after “dependable” restaurant and grocery customers cut back on orders, The Wall Street Journal reported. This also hurts the food supply and affects costs for everyone.
HOUSING PERMITS ARE FALLING HARDEST IN THE MOST IMMIGRANT-RELIANT REGIONS
Look to similar distress when it comes to finding affordable housing. Like agriculture, the construction industry depends heavily on the labor and skills of immigrant workers. And, like agriculture, this industry has been hemorrhaging laborers. In the five states most reliant on immigrant labor, construction employment fell 1.3 percent while the rest of the country grew 3.3 percent.
“Building permits show the same pattern,” the report said. “Nationally, permits for single-family homes fell 9.5 percent from March 2025 to June 2026 (seasonally adjusted), but the decline was far sharper in the regions most reliant on immigrant labor.” New homes also cost more where immigrant labor has been scarcest:
- Northeast (23% foreign-born construction workforce): new-home prices up 15.4%
- West (25% foreign-born construction workforce): new-home prices up 8.2%
- South and Midwest (combined 16% foreign-born construction workforce): new-home prices essentially unchanged.
While Texas doesn’t rank in the five states most reliant on immigrant labor, the pattern has played out in regions hard-hit by ICE abductions, including the Rio Grande Valley. “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 SICK AND ELDERLY ARE PAYING COSTS OF IMMIGRANT-DEPENDENT CARE
Home health care – hugely dependent on the dedication and skills of immigrant workers – is another one of the clearest examples of the ICE tax. “Of the home health care workforce, 39.8 percent are immigrants – more than 220,000 workers,” the report said. “As with the other immigrant-dependent industries examined in this report, prices have exceeded overall inflation: home health care service prices are up 10.7 percent over the last year.”
That trend is only set to worsen now that the administration is determined to delegalize hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants following a Supreme Court decision last month. NPR noted this will have “a catastrophic impact on the nationwide healthcare workforce crisis,” due to the fact that 103,000 Haitian immigrants now facing mass deportation work as health and home care workers, with thousands concentrated in major areas including Boston, New York City, and Miami.
The administration is aware of the downstream consequences of mass deportation. FHCA, Florida’s largest nursing home association representing nearly 700 facilities, noted in a letter that the loss of these essential workers has the “potential to destabilize an already fragile long term care workforce and jeopardize access to care for countless nursing home and assisted living residents,” both in Florida and across the U.S.
Bottom line: these increased costs are a deliberate policy choice and result of prioritizing a hugely unpopular mass deportation agenda over a hugely popular pathway to citizenship for our undocumented neighbors – and we’re paying for it. Check out the “End the ICE Tax” website here and the full report here.
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation agenda led by armed, masked ICE agents has become an economic drag, a virtual tax on every American family and community, whether they’ve ever thought about immigration or not.
— Vanessa Cardenas (@vcardenas.bsky.social) 2026-08-05T14:23:19.267Z
“Forcibly deporting hundreds of thousands of essential workers means extra dollars at the grocery checkout, the home that costs six figures more to build, the corner store that goes quiet after a raid, the job that disappears when a coworker never comes back to work,” said America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas. “Instead of working to bring costs down and make America more affordable, they’ve chosen a deportation machine that terrorizes our communities, hurts our businesses, and sticks every family with the bill. It’s time to end the ‘ICE tax’ and put American families ahead of a reckless policy that has caused costs to rise.”
