The economic cost of ICE raids has now been measured in Chicago, and the figure is large. A new study estimates that immigration enforcement operations beginning in early 2025 drained more than $1.26 billion from local businesses across Cook County.

What makes the finding notable is where the money disappeared from. The losses did not concentrate in immigrant neighbourhoods. They landed hardest in the ones people stopped travelling to.

How the Researchers Measured It

The report, published by the University of Illinois Chicago, took an unusual approach. Rather than relying on surveys or business receipts, researchers used anonymised cellphone GPS data to track movement between immigrant and non-immigrant neighbourhoods throughout Cook County.

That method captures something surveys tend to miss: not what people say they did, but where they actually went.

The pattern was stark. The routine back-and-forth travel between these areas collapsed almost immediately after President Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2025, as rumours spread that Chicago would be an early target for Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. The sweeps followed.

The Numbers

Professor Matt Wilson, a co-author of the study, described the scale of the drop.

Retail visits fell by 9 percent and restaurant visits by 10 percent, and the decline held for roughly a year. Crucially, Wilson said, it did not bounce back afterward. Behaviour changed systematically after January 20, 2025, and in his assessment the city still has not recovered.

The estimated cost to retail shops and restaurants in non-immigrant neighbourhoods is approximately $1.26 billion. The state of Illinois lost an estimated $107 million in tax revenue.

For a small business, a sustained 10 percent reduction in foot traffic across a full year is not a rough patch. It is often the difference between viability and closure.

The Assumption the Study Undermines

Wilson argued the findings challenge a common misconception about how immigrant communities function economically.

Many people treat Latino and immigrant communities as insular and self-contained, he said. The data suggests the opposite. These communities are deeply woven into the broader economy, and residents routinely travel considerable distances across the county for shopping, dining and errands.

When that movement stops, the effect radiates outward into neighbourhoods that have nothing to do with enforcement operations. The businesses absorbing the loss are frequently owned and staffed by people entirely unconnected to the immigration debate.

Fear as an Economic Force

The behaviour change was driven by something simple and difficult to quantify: people were frightened.

A Chicago waitress named Caridad, who asked NPR to withhold her surname out of concern about being targeted, captured it in the days around the 2025 inauguration. She said she needed to buy groceries but had not gone, because ICE might be there. People were beyond afraid, she said. They were panicking.

That single decision, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people and repeated daily, is what a billion dollars of lost commerce actually looks like.

Where Enforcement Stands Now

Since then, the administration’s immigration operations have produced hundreds of thousands of arrests nationwide. The immigration detention population currently stands at a record of roughly 65,000 people.

The White House defended the approach. Spokesperson Lauren Bis told NPR that removing criminals from the streets makes communities safer for business owners and customers, adding that nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests involve people charged or convicted of a crime in the United States.

ICE’s own figures complicate that claim. Agency statistics show that roughly 70 percent of people currently in detention have no criminal convictions.

The two numbers are not directly contradictory, since one describes arrests and the other describes the detained population. But the gap between them is significant enough to matter in any honest accounting.

Not Just Chicago

The Cook County study joins a growing body of research reaching similar conclusions in different places.

A Brookings Institution analysis estimated a decline of roughly 1.7 percentage points in aggregate consumer spending across states with high enforcement activity.

In Minneapolis, the city has assessed total economic damage from enforcement sweeps at close to $700 million. Small businesses there lost more than $81 million in revenue during January alone.

Different cities, different methodologies, same direction.

Why This Research Keeps Producing the Same Result

The mechanism is not complicated. Consumer economies run on routine. People shop on the way home, eat out on Friday, visit relatives across town on Sunday.

Enforcement operations disrupt that routine not only for people directly at risk but for anyone in a mixed-status household, anyone uncertain about documentation, and anyone simply unwilling to test the question. Households that stay home stop spending, and the businesses that depended on that spending absorb the shortfall.

Wilson’s central finding, that behaviour did not revert after the initial wave passed, is the most economically consequential part. Temporary shocks are survivable. Permanent shifts in where people are willing to go reshape which businesses exist at all.

The Debate This Sets Up

Supporters of aggressive enforcement argue the policy serves public safety goals that cannot be reduced to spending figures. Critics counter that the safety benefits are unproven while the economic damage is now being documented repeatedly and precisely.

What the Chicago study adds is specificity. A billion dollars is no longer an abstraction or a projection. It is an estimate built from where phones actually moved, and where they stopped moving, over the course of a year.