With the money being spent by the federal government on mass deportations, Wisconsin could cover about 94,000 Head Start slots.
The comparison is provided by a new calculator released by the Economic Policy Institute. It outputs the cost of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in any state, county or city, along with the equivalent value of various social services. The calculator shows deportations have cost more than $3.8 billion in Wisconsin.
Gordon Lafer, professor in the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon and research associate at the institute, said it is shocking to see such a high price tag while so many people are struggling to pay for food, housing and health insurance.
"We wanted to show what the trade-off is so that people understand we could be having all these things that really matter in people's lives, and instead the money's being wasted on this political circus of mass deportations," Lafer asserted.
The calculator showed with the money, Wisconsin could fund medical care for more than 184,000 BadgerCare Plus recipients. The Trump administration said deportations will restore economic stability and improve public safety.
But Lafer argued deportations are not doing so, pointing to data from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute showing just 5% of people booked by ICE have a violent criminal conviction, while the vast majority had no criminal record at all.
"This is really not a Republican versus Democratic issue. If you ask almost anybody, 'Would it be better to spend the money on having smaller class sizes for our kids or having more affordable health insurance?' Then almost everybody would say yes," Lafer contended.
In total, the Trump administration has spent about $270 billion on deportations. Lafer acknowledged the number is hard to visualize on a national scale but the calculator allows people to scale it to the size of where people live, adding the results can be more dramatic for small towns.
"If you live in a small place and you say, 'Oh, we could have 10 extra school teachers,' and everybody who has a kid in school can imagine what that would mean for their kid," Lafer observed.
