With a Body Count

Trump promised a million deportations a year. That was the number his people used. A million. Said it with the confidence of a man who has never had to actually do anything.

The actual number, based on real data, runs behind Biden’s pace. Biden deported 685,000 people in his last full fiscal year. Quietly. Without military aircraft and television cameras. Without Stephen Miller holding press conferences about it. The administration that screamed open borders every day for four years was quieter than this one and moved more people out the door.

That part everybody noticed. Here’s the part they didn’t.

From January to July 2025, more than 1.2 million immigrants left the workforce. Not deported. Left. Vanished from job sites, farms, kitchens, and construction crews because the atmosphere had become too dangerous to show up. The effect was the same as a deportation, without the flight or the camera crew. The worker was gone. The job stayed empty.

The promise was that removing these people would free up work for Americans. That was the deal. You get rid of the immigrants, Americans step in, wages go up, everybody wins. It was a clean story, the kind that sounds true before you have to test it against anything real.

Here’s what the test produced.

The agricultural industry saw a total drop in employment of 155,000 workers from March to July 2025, compared to a 2.2 percent increase during the same period the year before. Not a slowdown in growth. A drop. Crops don’t wait for policy debates. About 34 percent of construction workers are immigrants. In trades like drywall and plastering, the share runs closer to 60 percent. Job growth in immigrant-heavy industries — hotels, restaurants, construction, home health aides — ran at zero percent in July 2025. Zero.

Americans did not step in. There was no line of citizens waiting to replace them. There never was.

The Labor Department admitted in a filing in the Federal Register that Trump’s immigration crackdown risked a “labor shortage exacerbated by the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens.” That is the administration’s own agency using the phrase “near total cessation.” They wrote that. In a federal filing. Because it was true and they needed to say it even if nobody was supposed to notice.

This is the part they don’t put in the press releases.

The deportation story was always about crime. The gangs. The terrorists. The infestation. ICE was going to go get them. All of them. What it turned out to be was a lot of people arrested in parking lots, on their way to work, dropping kids at school. The crackdown is projected to reduce the U.S. workforce by 6.8 million people by 2028 and 15.7 million by 2035. That is not a crime reduction. That is an economic amputation.

Trump’s immigration policies will lower the projected average annual economic growth rate to 1.3 percent from 1.8 percent over the next decade. Half a point of GDP, year after year, compounding. The people who were supposed to benefit from this — the American workers — will find themselves in a slower economy with higher prices for food, housing, and services, and fewer workers to take care of an aging population that needs more of all three.

Immigrants comprise more than 20 percent of employment in agriculture, construction, transportation, warehousing, general services, and waste services. These are not luxury sectors. These are the sectors that build your house, grow your food, drive your packages, and clean up after you. You cannot remove a fifth of the workforce from essential industries and replace it with a press conference.

And it is not just the undocumented. Legal immigration has been strangled alongside it. Requests for H-2B temporary work visas have already surpassed the annual cap, and employers say their chance of getting the workers they need is almost nil. The paperwork was already a nightmare. The supply was already inadequate. The administration made it worse and called it protection.

With U.S. fertility rates at historic lows, immigration is the only mechanism available to maintain population stability and workforce size. This is not an opinion. It is arithmetic. An aging country that is not replacing its workers needs immigrants or it needs to shrink. There is no third option. The people who wrote this policy knew that, or they should have, and they proceeded anyway.

The theater was the point. The flights with soldiers and zip ties and orange jumpsuits were the point. The cameras on the tarmac were the point. They told a story about strength and order and America taking its country back, and the story felt true while the economy quietly swallowed the cost.

The body count is real. The jobs it was supposed to save are not.

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