I write with alarm about the misguided efforts being pursued by Homeland Security to construct a detention center in Utah and five other states (purportedly out of soft-sided tents) to “house” up to 10,000 immigrants each that are going to be arrested by ICE.
Utahns should remember the ugly things done previously here in Utah with the internment camps to “house” Japanese Americans during WWII. Such unwise, over-aggressive efforts should not happen again in Utah.
I join Gov. Spencer Cox in expressing appreciation that the border is secure. The apprehensions on the southern border are 95% lower than the monthly average of the prior administration.
It’s past time for a bipartisan legislative effort to address the broken immigration system. The goal should be, as has been talked about for decades, to create a workable solution for the fact that many millions of immigrants are, for the most part, working in our economy and are part of our social fabric.
That solution would be to somehow vet those non-criminal workers and create a way to obtain legal status. We are all supportive of the goal to remove the “worst of the worst” and the criminal element among them.
Yet sadly, the current TV ad running nationally, including in Utah, wrongfully claims that ICE is arresting the “worst of the worst” as it spends millions of dollars in its attempts to hire 10,000 more agents (targeting our local law enforcement officers with offers of $50,000 signing bonuses) to pursue their stated goal of “mass deportations.”
There are even reports that ICE is considering hiring private bounty hunters to locate more people to arrest.
Such ICE ads are misleading. It’s common for people to be arrested and detained in the workforce — not while they are committing crimes or because they are known to have committed crimes.
In July the percent of non-criminals being arrested in the U.S. increased to 60%. And as recently reported by an independent non-partisan group tracking this, more than 70% of those being arrested and detained by ICE have no criminal record at all.
It’s also unclear how many of those in ICE custody with “criminal records” have been convicted of or charged with violent or serious crimes, as opposed to misdemeanors (traffic tickets) or immigration-related crimes. According to a Migrant Policy Institute report, most that were considered “criminals” had committed minor offenses such as traffic violations.
The recent Big Beautiful Bill funded about $170 billion of our tax dollars for the initial efforts. That is not the cost to remove the “worst of the worst” as claimed by ICE. That is the initial funding to work toward the goal of deporting approximately 12 million people — the vast majority, again, who won’t be criminals in any meaningful sense (Crossing the border is known as “improper entry” which is a misdemeanor under federal law).
This has been highlighted by the recent public arrest by ICE agents at the airport of the mother of four citizen children, who had been here for more than 18 years and who had no criminal record. Then there was the earlier arrest of the Korean-born musician for the Utah Symphony and the arrest of the University of Utah student driving to Colorado to visit her boyfriend.
Sadly, there are hundreds more like them being arrested by ICE here in Utah that do not make the news.
The practicality is that ICE will never be able to mass deport all that they want to deport, according to independent analyses. In the middle of the year, ICE was directed to arrest double the number of undocumented immigrants. At the rate this administration hopes to deport (1 million a year, and 3,000 per day), it would still take 12 years to deport everyone here illegally.
But ICE is nowhere near of reaching the goal of 1 million a year. Since Oct. 1, 2025, ICE has averaged about 1200 arrests a day - on pace for taking more than 25 years to accomplish the stated goal.
People will eventually acknowledge, after substantial damage is done to the economy, the huge negative impact occurring when it loses all those working in the economy.
Yet for now, those supporting mass deportation ignore the practical and financial impacts of such efforts.
Before deporting a significant numbers of immigrants working in the construction industry in which I work, that industry is already short some 500,000 workers in the country. The same is the case in the manufacturing industry.
The problem of the lack of needed workers is already being experienced in a profound way in the agricultural industry. Acknowledging the obvious negative impact, the administration has waffled about trying to find a solution to the agricultural industry. But thus far, nothing has been done.
I have heard some in the administration say, including U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, that the needed replacement workers will come into the workforce from 34 million able-bodied adults that will be leaving the Medicaid system.
Yet, this idea is a pipe dream that overlooks the reality of the workforce.
It’s hard to see how the financial impact won’t be horrific. Not only will we taxpayers pay hundreds of billions of dollars in removing workers from our economy, but there will also be billions of dollars a year in economic production lost from those workers. And then we be faced with the need to bring more immigrants into the country to replace the millions needed to work in our economy.
There will also reportedly be a loss of $100 billion per year in taxes being paid by those workers that will be lost (including more than $25 billion a year to prop up our Social Security trust fund) as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in consumption of goods and services from those workers.
If successful, the impact of this wide effort will be the equivalent to emptying out more than all the population of the intermountain states.
I renew a decades-old request that the federal legislature, including our federal delegation, fix the broken immigration system so that the good people who are currently performing the needed work in our economy can be vetted and those non-criminals can obtain some kind of a legal work permit.
It is important that our delegation hear from us Utahns that a reasonable solution is desperately needed, so that we can all avoid the economic and humanitarian disaster that is coming down the track.
Mass deportation of the non-criminal immigrant workforce is not the solution.