During the campaign, President Trump made a big promise of mass deportation against undocumented individuals– and now that plan is underway. 13investigates is investigating the plan’s cost, the challenges ahead, and its implications for the economy.

“There are, and it’s an estimate. Because there’s no registry of undocumented people in the United States, but the estimate is about 11 million undocumented,” Ron Seyb, Professor in Government at Skidmore College, said. “As a point of reference, the U.S. prison population is 1.9 million, so that’s a large number of people.”

Throughout the history of the United States– immigration has been an ongoing battle, at times dividing Congress and even the american voter.

“There’s been a pretty startling change in public opinion in the last four years in immigration,” Seyb said. “If you go back to even to 2020, when Joe Biden was running for the presidency, about 35% of Americans wanted to see immigration increase, about 31% wanted to decrease.”

Deportation is not a new concept, according to U.S.A. Facts, a non-profit that makes government data easy for all, says there were one point one million deportations in 2023– as of August 2024, there have already been 526,000 deportations or repatriations. Lauren DesRosier, Director of the Immigration Law Clinic, at Albany Law School, said immigration is not as simple as one may think

“There are two general senses of immigration visa generally,” DesRosier said. “There’s humanitarian and work both have not been updated for several decades, so they’re not responsive to what’s happening right now. It might take a very long time for them to actually see the outcome of any application. And that means that they’re living in limbo for a long time”

You may be wondering where these people come from. According to data from this fiscal year, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the majority of those crossing into the United States are from Mexico and other parts of Central and South America. Experts say they’re coming here for different reasons.

“Some are coming here for religious reasons; many are fleeing for safety reasons,” Ron Seyb said. “The asylum system was set up in 1951, but there’s international law behind that. We have an obligation to allow people to come into this country on religious reasons, reasons of creed, reasons of nationality, reasons of race.”

While President Trump’s concept of mass deportation is not new, this is the first time we have seen a roundup of this size against undocumented immigrants.

“People live in fear, and it means that people aren’t able to actually connect with their communities,” Lauren DesRosier said. “And it means that people aren’t able to access and take advantage of potential statuses that they might be eligible for.”

For the second part of the series, News Channel 13 spoke with organizations that are stepping up and helping the undocumented community and shared more about the change they want to see.