Increased ICE activity under the second Trump administration has not opened up jobs for U.S.-born workers and hurts the labor market as a whole, according to a .
There’s a common narrative that there’s a certain number of jobs that get distributed between immigrant and non-immigrant workers, study author and CU Boulder economics professor Chloe East said. And when an immigrant is removed, the reasoning is that it creates a job for a U.S.-born worker, which is not at all whatap actually happening, she said.
“Because immigrants take jobs that are undesirable for lots of reasons, they’re more dirty, dangerous, seasonal, lower paid, et cetera, itap actually pretty hard for employers to attract U.S. born workers to take those jobs,” East said. “… We don’t see any evidence that employers are raising wages to attract U.S. born workers to take those jobs, and so instead what seems to be happening is that employers are just reducing production and hiring overall.”
East and CU Boulder co-author Elizabeth Cox analyzed data from a federal monthly employment survey and data on ICE arrests across 58 regions around the country.
They found that after a region saw a surge in ICE arrests, employment among remaining immigrants declined 4% on average, likely due to a chilling effect. An increase of 1,200 ICE arrests in a region corresponded to 7,500 immigrants dropping out of the labor market, East said.
“People are fearful to leave their homes for fear that it is going to lead to an interaction with ICE and a potential detention or deportation,” East said. “That includes leaving people’s homes to go to work.”
This means that those most at risk within a household will stay home, and other family members might work instead. A co-authored by East in February found that U.S.-born teenagers in immigrant families were more likely to work in 2025 than in 2024 and less likely to be in school full-time. Her past work also shows that mass deportation increases the poverty rate for immigrant families.
The idea that increased immigration enforcement hurts the labor market is not a new one, East said. Her results in this study are consistent with her work studying immigration enforcement under President Barack Obama, and other economists have studied mass deportation in the 1930s and saw similar effects.
What is new under the second Trump administration is the scale and raw number of arrests, East said, as well as ICE being more indiscriminate about who they arrest. East, who specializes in labor economics and immigration policy, also in February that found ICE arrests reached a decade high. On average, there were 821 daily ICE arrests during the first 10 months of Trump’s second term, from January 2025 to October 2025, a 170% increase from daily ICE arrests made during President Joe Biden’s final year in office.
“ICE seems to be arresting people much more randomly and going to places that they don’t typically go, like people’s residences or workplaces or the parking lot of a business,” East said. “And that seems to be having a much larger impact on the immigrant community than we’ve seen in past mass deportation campaigns.”
This “chilling effect” expands beyond work, East said. Immigrants are avoiding going out in general, including to restaurants and retail stores, which is having a depressive effect on economic activity overall. Fewer people going to restaurants hurts business and means restaurants are hiring fewer people.
“There’s some other research coming out parallel to mine that shows that is happening in the second Trump administration,” she said.
One study , a global, independent research network, found areas experiencing the largest ICE enforcement surges saw overall card spending decline by 1.7 percentage points. The Minnesota North Star Policy Action research institute in February that found that consumer spending declined by an estimated 2.9% in Minnesota resulting from ICE activity in January, representing a loss of $626 million in one month.
Eastap latest study also found the biggest labor market impacts are in industries with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants, such as the agriculture, construction, manufacturing and wholesale industries. The largest negative impact is in construction, where 16% of the workforce is made up of undocumented immigrants, according to the study.
Moving forward, she plans to dig into that construction finding and collect data to see how the production of new buildings and new homes is being impacted. She also wants to explore how immigration is impacting the childcare sector.
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