How Much a Deportation Can Cost in Trump’s America

When Jose Ventura Rubio landed at Miami International Airport the day before Valentine’s Day, he looked forward to moving back to Florida to be with his children and grandchildren. He’d spent the preceding seven years in his home country of Honduras, following a divorce in the US, but he had a green card that expired in 2028. He didn’t realize his extended time away meant he’d failed to meet a residency requirement, making him vulnerable to deportation. He was taken into custody at the airport, and then spent the next 128 days in six Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities spread across the US.

Total cost

Days in detention

Ventura Rubio was first taken to the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, where he was kept in a hold room for four days before being officially processed into the detention facility. A month later he was transferred about an hour’s drive north to Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, where he stayed for three days.

He was then flown four hours across the country to New Mexico. CSI Aviation, a private company, holds the prime contract for these ICE charter flights. Ventura Rubio spent more than two months in the Torrance County Detention Facility, awaiting his fate in immigration court.

In late May the court ordered Ventura Rubio’s deportation. That didn’t end his journey. He was bused by TransCor America, another private contractor, to the El Paso Enhanced Hardened Facility. It was there that he decided to waive his right to appeal a judge’s removal order.

Ventura Rubio was then transferred to the Otero County Processing Center, another detention facility in New Mexico, before being sent to El Paso yet again. Days later he was flown to Louisiana and booked into the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center. From there, on June 22, Ventura Rubio was put on one last ICE flight, this time to Honduras.

Ventura Rubio’s experience is one among tens of thousands. Since Donald Trump returned to office, more than 80,000 people have been transferred at least once between facilities separated by 200 miles or more. More than 5,000 people have been transferred that far at least three times—12 times more people than during Joe Biden’s first six months in office.

Note: The companies listed are the prime contractors associated with each facility or transfer. In some cases, such as Krome, the contractor provides security and management but doesn’t own the facility. In others, like Broward, the contractor both owns and operates the facility. CSI holds the prime contract for charter flights but subcontracts the actual operation of the flights.

Under previous administrations, Ventura Rubio likely still would have been placed in removal proceedings, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who reviewed Bloomberg Businessweek’s methodology for calculating the cost of Ventura Rubio’s deportation. What makes his experience unique to Trump’s second term, Reichlin-Melnick says, is the time he spent in detention—and the number of places he did so. “The way people are being treated now is different,” he says.

That comes at a price. To detain and deport Ventura Rubio, the US spent an estimated $25,700, according to Businessweek’s calculation.

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“When I look at this, I ask: ‘Does this make sense?’” Reichlin-Melnick says. “To me the answer is no. This is a bad mismatch of our priorities.”

Throughout Ventura Rubio’s detention, Businessweek reporters received real-time updates from his daughter Carol Barrios, a US citizen who lives outside Miami with her family. Barrios pieced together her father’s whereabouts using sources including the ICE Online Detainee Locator System; emotional calls from her father and other men in detention with him; emails (responding to her own frantic emails) from agency officials; and documents released to her by the Otero Immigration Court, which oversaw her father’s case after he was transferred to New Mexico.

Ventura Rubio in Honduras after being removed from the US. Photographer: David Estrada/Bloomberg

With this information, reporters retraced Ventura Rubio’s journey through anonymized, individual-level ICE records obtained in a public-records lawsuit filed by a team that includes researchers from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and the University of California at Los Angeles. Federal contracting data, public ICE records and flight analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group ICE Flight Monitor then helped reveal what Ventura Rubio’s detention and deportation cost the federal government.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin confirmed that Ventura Rubio, who has a conviction for driving under the influence in 2016, was arrested on Feb. 13 and deported on June 22. In an emailed statement, she reiterated the $17,121 figure as the average cost to “arrest, detain and remove” one person and said self-deportation via the CBP Home app was “a safer and less expensive, more dignified way to leave the US.” Even with a $1,000 “exit bonus” promised to people who leave, she added, self-deportations are projected to cost the government roughly 70% less.

Businessweek’s $25,700 estimate for Ventura Rubio’s deportation is conservative, according to experts. It doesn’t account for legal costs to initiate deportation proceedings in the first place or roughly 315 miles’ worth of short-distance transfers, which are staffed with either ICE officers or security contractors. Nor does it reflect agency employee pay and administrative costs, which ICE’s figure includes.

“This is a nationwide cost being imposed on all taxpayers, and it’s coming at the expense of other priorities that Americans care about,” says David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, who also reviewed Businessweek’s methodology. “This is something very few Americans have considered or thought about deeply. But that is the trade-off of government.”

Ventura Rubio was transferred more than the typical person in ICE detention, even under an administration where such transfers have increased. About 70% of people who were transferred while in ICE custody were moved one or two times during the first six months of Trump’s second term. An additional 28% of people were transferred three to five times.

He was also in detention longer than average, which was roughly 27 days for everyone who was booked into detention and then deported from Jan. 20 through late July.

Still, situations like Ventura Rubio’s, where someone is moved several times while fighting their deportation, have become more common under Trump. Just 150 people were transferred six to eight times during the first six months of the Biden administration. In the first six months under Trump, that number rose to 3,234.

“The typical taxpayer does not understand how expensive this is, how inefficient this is and also how inhumane it is,” says Jennie Murray, president and chief executive officer of the National Immigration Forum. “I think the misnomer is that we’ll put them on a Greyhound bus and drive them across the border to Mexico. But there are all these very expensive costs.”

Under some circumstances, deportations are far more expensive than Ventura Rubio’s. Because he was taken into custody at an airport, his deportation doesn’t include costs associated with ICE raids or arrests by local authorities that have agreements to aid in immigration enforcement.

ICE contracts out the vast majority of its detention work to private companies. Businessweek sought comment from the prime contractors associated with each detention facility or transfer that was part of Ventura Rubio’s time in custody. Representatives for Geo and CoreCivic referred questions about the costs associated with Ventura Rubio’s detention to ICE. CoreCivic added that it doesn’t enforce immigration laws or “have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release.” The other contractors for facilities and transfers included in the analysis didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Then there are the costs to Ventura Rubio’s family. Barrios flew to New Mexico twice to visit her father in detention and traveled to Honduras to help him get on his feet once he was deported. She had to take off work to do that. While he was detained she regularly transferred money into his account so she could speak to him by phone. She and other family members sent him funds so he could buy snacks and condiments from the detention facilities’ commissaries.

Ventura Rubio with his daughter Carol Barrios at the home of a family member in Honduras. Photographer: David Estrada/Bloomberg

Barrios says those costs pale in comparison to the physical and emotional ones. In Florida, her father experienced chest pains and difficulty breathing. In New Mexico, his phone and clothes were stolen. “My father fell ill on Thursday and was denied medical care,” she wrote to the Otero Immigration Court, the ICE El Paso Field Office and the field office’s then-director on May 19, when Ventura Rubio was at the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico. A doctor had told her father the facility was short-staffed, she added. (CoreCivic, which owns and operates the facility, says that no one detained there “has been denied required or emergent medical care” and that “medical personnel are on-site 24/7 to provide high-quality care to any detainee who needs it.”) His feet later swelled so much he could no longer wear shoes, and Barrios worried it was a symptom of his high blood pressure.

Now back in Honduras, Ventura Rubio says he continues to feel the effects of ICE detention. “I would be served lunch here, and I would wolf down my meat like someone was going to take it from me,” he says in Spanish. “The psychological impact is just so severe.”

Here’s What It Can Cost to Detain and Deport Just One Person

The US government says it spends an average of $17,121 to deport a single person. One man’s journey through the process shows the price can be significantly higher.