The modern deportation debate often turns on a single question: who qualifies as a “criminal” deserving immediate removal from the United States? Anti-deportation advocates frequently focus on that definition, critics argue, while overlooking the steep public cost of waiting.
A recent case in Loudoun County, Virginia, underscores the stakes. Police arrested Isaac Melendez-Carranza on allegations that he sold fentanyl to two Park View High School students who overdosed. Both students survived only because Narcan was administered.
Like other prominent cases involving Laken Riley and Sheridan Gorman, critics say the alleged offense carries an additional immigration-policy dimension. Melendez-Carranza reportedly entered the country illegally and was ordered deported by a judge in July 2024. Yet federal immigration authorities encountered him the following month during the Biden administration and allowed him to remain in the country.
Even now, many Democratic officials, immigration advocates and media commentators maintain that deporting him on the basis of an arrest or unresolved charges would be improper.
The Department of Homeland Security says 70% of illegal immigrants have either been convicted of or charged with a crime beyond an immigration violation. Groups including the Cato Institute and the Brennan Center use a narrower benchmark, emphasizing criminal convictions obtained in the United States, and contend that roughly 35% should be categorized as criminals.
“A charge is not a conviction,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, the Brennan Center’s senior director for justice, has argued. “People are innocent until proven guilty.” Opponents of that view counter that the discussion concerns people who have already violated U.S. immigration law.
Advocates’ calculations also generally omit criminal records from immigrants’ home countries. DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin says that distinction can be significant: “Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
Then there is the cost of pursuing the criminal case. If Melendez-Carranza accepts a plea deal, prosecuting an alleged fentanyl-distribution felony could cost Virginia taxpayers between $50,000 and $100,000 or more. Should he contest the charges and take the case to trial, courtroom and jail expenses alone could climb to $150,000.
The larger expense could come after a conviction. Because Democratic-led Virginia is likely to require Melendez-Carranza to complete any state sentence rather than transfer him to ICE immediately for deportation, a disputed case ending in a lengthy prison term could leave taxpayers facing a total cost of $600,000 or more.
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A less costly outcome would still carry a substantial price tag. A plea agreement involving time served and one or two additional years in prison could cost the public about $150,000.
And, while being charged with a crime doesn’t guarantee a conviction, conviction is overwhelmingly the outcome.
The most recent comprehensive Bureau of Justice Statistics report, covering FY 2023, shows convictions for about nine out of every 10 federal defendants whose cases were adjudicated (which is virtually all cases where criminals are charged with a crime); the 2025 data for Virginia courts are virtually identical.
Why should taxpayers have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars prosecuting and incarcerating someone already in the country illegally, rather than deporting him?
More serious charges mean even greater expenses: The total trial, jail and prison costs for a rapist can easily run to $1.8 million or more; for a murderer, to well over $3 million.
What if the government had had to prosecute and convict all 248,000 illegal aliens deported in the second Trump term based on only arrests — even if only for a drug offense — before it could deport them?
At a minimum expense of $150,000 per case, prosecuting all 248,000 would run taxpayers $37.2 billion. At $600,000 or more per case, the total would exceed $148.8 billion.
The liberal and libertarian advocates offer no good justification for forcing taxpayers to spend such vast sums — again, at least hundreds of thousands of dollars per illegal immigrant — when the government already has legal authority to deport every one of them.
John R. Lott Jr., the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, served as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy in the US Department of Justice in 2020-’21.