The Trump administration’s push to deport millions of people living in the country illegally could seriously disrupt key sectors of California’s economy.
A recent report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute estimates that mass deportations here could result in economic losses of nearly $280 billion annually.
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While the loss of such workers “is very unlikely to occur through a single policy action,” smaller-scale operations to remove deportees from the workforce would create broader ripple effects, said Abby Raisz, the report’s co-author.
“When you remove these workers, they also aren’t going out and eating downtown or going to shops, or taking their kids to community events,” she said.
The report by the regional think tank comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement. According to border czar Tom Homan, over 200,000 people have been deported since Trump took office in January.
While it’s unclear exactly how many people in California or the Bay Area have been deported, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data suggests more than 1,400 have been removed since January from what’s known as the San Francisco Area of Responsibility, which includes Northern California, Hawaii, Guam and Saipan.
At the San Jose Flea Market, attendance has declined sharply despite the absence of immigration enforcement so far. “We may be down as much as 40-50% over the past few weeks,” the market’s marketing director, Rich Alvari, wrote in an email.
Julián Castro, CEO of the San Francisco-based Latino Community Foundation, said the rise in deportations has caused “a tremendous amount of stress and chaos.”
“We’re seeing right now the real-time economic impact that overzealous immigration enforcement can have,” he said. “When ICE conducts these raids, it causes economic strain on communities.”
Among the report’s central findings are that there are 2.28 million immigrants in California without protected legal status and that deporting these immigrants would cost the California economy $278.4 billion annually.
“They grow and cook our food,” Raisz said. “They construct housing that we need. They care for children and the elderly.”
In the Bay Area, the construction and hospitality industries would be among the most heavily affected, Raisz said. Nearly 26% of construction laborers and roughly 35% of maids and housekeepers are working in California illegally, according to the report.
The report’s conclusions were reached in part by analyzing data from the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
San Jose State University demographer Matthew J. Holian, who reviewed the report’s findings, said the authors used established methodologies, and their estimates are probably “in the right ballpark,” he wrote in an email. “But it is a question that requires more research to answer more accurately.”
The report has its critics, including Carl DeMaio, a Republican member of the California State Assembly from San Diego, who described the report as a “propaganda report that is designed to distract us from the real issue here.”
“It is falsely trying to pretend that people who want a secure border and who oppose illegal immigration somehow oppose legal immigration,” he said. “This is shameful, to have Democrats cavorting with big business so that they can get cheap labor.”
The Trump administration has said its deportation efforts target criminals and cast the removals as a move to secure the U.S., but people without criminal records have been detained.
The threat of mass deportations already has visibly disrupted life in the Bay Area.
Onofre Vizcarra, owner of the San Jose restaurant La Enramada for the past 19 years, said traffic had dropped by 80% in the past few weeks.
“I’ve had to lay off three workers, and my wife and I now work their jobs all day,” he said. Another restaurant owner, he said, had been forced to shut down after 45 years due to the decline in traffic.
At the nearby flea market, many vendors expressed similar concerns. Anastacio Maurillo, who has worked at Guerrero Produce for the past two decades, said the stand is “in crisis.”
“People are afraid to come,” he said. “If things continue like this, we’ll be left without jobs, without our business, without anything.”
Unloading crates of produce from his truck onto an empty street, Antonio Gonzalez, who has worked for 30 years at the market, recounted how packed it once was. Business, he said, was now down by half.
“This is my living,” he said, “so when I see it like that, I know I won’t make any money. I won’t have any money for rent, for my kids, for my family.”
In the midst of deportations, groups across California are working to provide assistance. Castro, the CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, emphasized the “vital” importance of “know your rights” workshops.
“People need to understand what the law is,” he said. “It is particularly important for them to understand that they have rights in the first place, because many are under the impression that they’re not a citizen, [so] they have no rights.”
“There’s an urgency to this moment,” he said. “And my hope is that from everyday voters to policymakers, that they will help change what we’re seeing today.”
Antonio Lopez, the associate director of Research and Advocacy at Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, described how the group has provided real-time ICE alerts, organized food pantries and deliveries, and held legal aid clinics. He also emphasized the role of “la cultura cura”, the notion that the “arts can heal.”
“How do we save the village? How do we stay empowered when this administration is trying to take that fence of empowerment away?” he asked. “We look to our culture, our stories, our narratives.”
But ultimately, Lopez said, the importance of immigrants to the California economy “should not be the only thing we see in them.”
“They’re mothers, they’re daughters, they’re children, they go to school, they go to church,” he said. “These folks are human beings, they just want the opportunity, and let’s do what we can to affirm to folks that they belong.”
Reporter Harriet Blair Rowan contributed to this story.