DHS says without evidence that mass deportations lead to cost-of-living decreases: ‘DHS is reducing your rent, especially in states that cooperate with ICE’
The Department of Homeland Security has claimed that the mass deportation of illegal immigrants by ICE has contributed to a significant cost-of-living decrease, citing decreased rent in several regions with heightened ICE activity. However, the agency did not cite the sources for the numbers it highlighted. The DHS simply declared in a post on X, “Want lower cost of living: support mass deportations.”
DHS makes the case in support of mass deportations
In the social media post, DHS claimed that the agency is “reducing your rent, especially in states that cooperate with ICE.” The post further said, “Texas accounted for about a quarter of ICE arrests in July and posted the country’s sharpest rent drops, with San Antonio down 4.8 percent, Austin 4.3 percent, Dallas and Houston about 3 percent. Miami’s average rent is down 2.6 percent. Phoenix is down 4.2 percent. Atlanta is down 3.2 percent. Nashville is down 5.3 percent. New Orleans is down 8 percent.”
DHS makes statistical claim — without mentioning sources
The agency did not mention the sources for the figures, neither did it mention the methodology used to arrive at the numbers. The post only points to unspecified “research” showing that “illegal-worker inflows push rents and home prices up,” adding that the “inflow has been reversed in the states running the hardest interior enforcement.” Furthermore, reports have mentioned that many of the percentages mentioned by the DHS in the post on X do not correspond with several major publicly available rental indexes.
According to reports, the “research” in question is likely a working thesis by economists Daniel J. Wilson of the San Francisco Fed and Xiaoqing Zhou of the Dallas Fed released earlier this year, which found that a surge in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden resulted in a hike in housing prices. However, the findings of the research were contested by other economists and housing experts, who found “inherent problems” with the study’s methodology.
How much truth is there to the assertion that mass deportations help housing prices
As part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the administration touted an alleged causal link between states willing to cooperate with ICE agents and lower rent. However, some of the metropolitan areas mentioned in the DHS’ social media post were already undergoing an adjustment in housing prices and rent due to a surge in new apartment and multifamily construction. Furthermore, the agency’s assertion failed to factor in a major side effect of mass deportation: the U.S. construction industry employs nearly 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, according to reports based on U.S. Census data and labor surveys cited by the American Business Immigration Coalition. This means that mass deportation of illegal immigrants would effectively leave the housing industry in a dire condition, although from a housing-market perspective, large-scale deportations should “help free up some housing,” according to Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin.
Mass deportations can actually have an adverse effect on the housing industry, experts say
“Immigrants play a significant role in construction, and reducing labor supply tends to raise building costs and slow new home production,” Fairweather said.
Restricting immigration carries the risk of making it “more difficult for companies to hire workers in the near-term, and that impact is likely to be acutely felt by a construction industry that employs many foreign-born workers,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com chief economist, previously said in a statement to Newsweek.
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has similarly argued that fewer available workers as a result of mass deportation can can delay construction, raise labor costs and ultimately drive up housing prices. For instance, a Reuters investigative report from July 2025 found that the construction of a $20 million recreation center project near Mobile, Alabama, went from being on schedule to facing about a three-week delay after an ICE raid in Florida.