Immigrants Belong HereEspañol

What we want

Legalize the people already here. Abolish ICE.

Two demands and the arithmetic behind them. Neither is radical: one was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, and the other is a request to stop running an agency younger than the iPod.

A pathway to citizenship.

Eleven million people live here permanently with no legal way to become permanent. That is a policy choice, and it can be un-chosen.

$40.2B
in additional annual tax revenue if the people already here could work legally
1986
the last time Congress passed a broad legalization — signed by Ronald Reagan

The average undocumented immigrant in the United States has been here for more than a decade. They have US-citizen children, mortgages, employers who depend on them, and tax records filed under an ITIN they will never collect a benefit against. What they do not have is any form to fill out.

This is not unprecedented territory. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act — signed by Ronald Reagan and passed by a bipartisan Congress — legalized roughly 2.7 million people. The country did not fall over. The subsequent forty years of gridlock have not reduced the undocumented population; they have only aged it into permanence.

Legalization pays for itself before you get to the moral argument. ITEP's estimate is $40.2 billion in additional annual tax revenue from work authorization alone, because payroll moves onto the books and wages rise toward their market level, which also removes the downward pressure on the wages of everyone working alongside them.

The demand is simple and it is old: register, screen, work, and after a defined period, apply to become a citizen of the country you already live in.

Sources

  1. 01Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants · Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy · 2024
  2. 02The Immigration Reform and Control Act: What Happened · Migration Policy Institute · 2019

Abolish ICE.

ICE is 23 years old. Seven in ten people it detains have no criminal conviction, and more people died in its custody in 2025 than in the previous four years combined.

70.6%
of people in ICE detention have no criminal conviction (July 2026)
92%
of the growth in detention this fiscal year is people with no criminal charge at all
23deaths
in ICE custody in FY2025 — versus 24 across the four years before it

Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created in 2003, in the reorganization that followed September 11. The country enforced its immigration laws for its entire prior history without it. "Abolish ICE" is not a demand to stop having immigration law; it is a demand to stop running a 23-year-old agency that has demonstrated it cannot be reformed from inside.

Look at who is actually in the cells. As of July 2026, 70.6 percent of people held in ICE detention had no criminal conviction, and a large share of those who did were convicted of traffic offenses. 92 percent of this fiscal year's growth in the detained population came from people with no criminal charge or conviction whatsoever. The population has been pushed past 70,000 — well beyond the roughly 41,500 beds the system was funded for.

That overcrowding has a body count. At least 23 people died in ICE detention in fiscal year 2025 — more than the previous four years combined — with December 2025 the deadliest single month on record and at least one death ruled a homicide by a medical examiner. This is a civil detention system, legally non-punitive, holding people who in most cases have not been charged with any crime.

The alternative is not chaos. It is enforcement that is court-supervised rather than agency-supervised, with counsel for people in removal proceedings, community-based case management instead of detention beds, and the money currently spent on 70,000 detention slots redirected to the immigration courts that are supposed to decide these cases in the first place.

Sources

  1. 01Immigration Detention Quick Facts · TRAC, Syracuse University · 2026
  2. 0292% of ICE Detention Growth in FY2026 Driven by Immigrants with No Criminal Convictions · Austin Kocher, Syracuse University · 2026
  3. 03Immigration Detention Is Harsher and Less Accountable Than Ever · American Immigration Council · 2026

Stop paying for mass deportation.

Deporting everyone would cost taxpayers $88 billion a year, take over a decade, and shrink the economy by more than the Great Recession did.

$88B/year
to deport one million people annually — for over a decade
4.2–6.8%
of US GDP lost — the Great Recession cost 4.3%
$1.1–1.7T
in total economic output erased

The American Immigration Council priced the plan out. A one-time removal of everyone here without status runs at least $315 billion in arrests, detention, legal processing and removal flights — and that is the conservative version. Doing it at a rate of one million people a year costs $88 billion annually and takes more than ten years, for a total near $968 billion.

Then the revenue side collapses: $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes gone, including $23 billion a year out of Social Security and $6 billion out of Medicare — funds that currently subsidize benefits for everyone else.

The output loss is between 4.2 and 6.8 percent of GDP, or $1.1 to $1.7 trillion. For comparison, US GDP contracted 4.3 percent during the entire Great Recession. This is a self-inflicted recession purchased at a cost of a trillion dollars, aimed at the workforce that builds the housing and harvests the food.

Every dollar of it is a choice about where public money goes. It could go to immigration judges, to legal representation, to processing the applications of people who want to register. It is going to detention beds instead.

Sources

  1. 01Mass Deportation: Devastating Costs to America · American Immigration Council · 2024