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The cost of mass deportation, measured in Donald Trumps

Javier Zarracina/Vox

On Thursday, Donald Trump declared that if he were elected president, he’d deport all 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the US — and let the “really good” ones back in.

Trump doesn’t appear to have a plan for how this would work. But other people have tried to sketch out what mass deportation would look like. And it would cost a lot of money.

You can think about the cost of mass deportation as $400 billion to $600 billion. Or you can think of it as more than 100 Donald Trumps:

trump_immigration_graphic2

(Javier Zarracina/Vox)

A quick note on the different estimates here. Trump himself claimed, when he filed financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission, that his net worth was (and we quote) “TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” The financial journalists over at Forbes, who have been tracking Trump’s businesses for decades, think that’s a load of hooey. They estimate his net worth to be about $4 billion.

So if you go by the more reliable, less Trumpian analysis of Trump’s worth, it would cost more than 100 Donald Trumps to put Donald Trump’s immigration plan into practice.

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