The economic chilling effect of Trump's immigration crackdown

ICE agents approach a house before detaining two people on Jan. 13 in Minneapolis. Stephen Maturen/ hide caption toggle caption Stephen Maturen/ Shortly after Inauguration Day in 2025, Planet Money visited Little Village , a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood in Chicago. It felt oddly quiet for what was usually a bustling part of the city, almost like a ghost town. The Trump administration had signaled it was about to do big ICE raids there (and eventually did). Many in the community seemed to be scared to go about business as usual. There seemed to be a clear "chilling effect" on their economic activity — like going to work, shopping, eating out, and so on. For that episode , we spoke with Chloe East, an economist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who has done extensive research on the economic effects of deportations. But back then, the only way to gauge the potential fallout from the second Trump administration's immigration crackdown was to look at past deportation efforts. Well, we now have data from last year's immigration crackdown. East and a co-author, Elizabeth Cox, recently released a new working paper, " Labor Market Impacts of ICE Activity in Trump 2.0 ," which analyzes how Trump's beefed up immigration enforcement affected employment, both for immigrants and workers born in the United States. So, did the immigration crackdown help the job prospects of U.S.-born workers? East says no. …