America is drowning in debt, and is also drowning in a flood of people who have entered the country illegally without any vetting. The solution to both problems may be the same.

On Monday, The Federalist reported:

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, American Immigration Council (AIC) Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick remarked last week that mass deportations would cost “at a minimum” $316 billion.

The AIC estimates that there is an annual cost of $88 billion to deport one million illegal aliens each year. That breaks down to $7 billion for arrests, $66 billion for detentions, $12.6 billion to go through the legal process, and $2.1 billion to transport deportees out of the country. It works out to $88,000 per deportee, but the council claims this is a “highly conservative estimate.” They conclude there is “a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade.”

…The AIC’s estimates depend on a lot of assumptions. Take their estimated costs of detention, which account for three-quarters of their total estimate. To deport one million people in a year doesn’t mean that you have to have enough detention facilities to house one million people for an entire year. Even if you take AIC’s claim that people will be detained for a little under two months on average, that means you would only have to house about 167,000 at any point in time. Others put the average detention time at around a month, so you only have to build facilities to house 83,000 and, according to AIC, we already have the facilities necessary to house 41,500.

The AIC assumes each facility holds 500 beds, so 83 new facilities will have to be built. With each facility costing $35.91 million, that comes to a cost of $3 billion, a fraction of the $66 billion.

The problem with the AIC numbers is even worse than that because they must rebuild 216 completely new facilities each and every year, but that isn’t necessary as these facilities will last for years.

The article concludes:

In September, the Deputy Director for ICE noted that of the 7.4 million “non-detained” noncitizens with pending cases that were released into the United States, 662,566 have a criminal record. Our estimates indicate that it would cost about $8 billion to arrest and deport these criminals.

By contrast, if these illegal aliens commit a crime resembling the most serious crime that they have previously been convicted or charged with, the victimization costs amount to at least $166.5 billion. The National Institute of Justice estimated the costs to victims by including medical bills, lost wages, social/victim services, property loss/damage, police/fire service costs, and pain and suffering.

The costs of crime are roughly at least 21 times higher than deportation costs.

When the AIC cost estimates are six to seven times larger than the per deportee costs that we have actually observed over the last decade, you would hope people would be skeptical. Unfortunately, the news media was only too willing to uncritically repeat their claims.

Also, how much money are states spending on feeding and housing people who are breaking the law by being here?