White House claimed 2 million native-born job gains in 2025; Brookings study estimates the enforcement surge cost 668,000 jobs

Two documents describe the same twelve months and disagree on the sign. One is a White House release dated January 14, 2026, titled "Mass Deportations Are Improving Americans' Quality of Life." The other is a Brookings Institution study published May 29, 2026, "Shock, awe, and economic fallout," which tests the release's premise against a federal payroll dataset. Below, each is set out in its own terms, followed by a third record neither cites.

The claim

The White House release stated that, between January and December 2025, "two million native-born Americans have gained employment, while 662,000 foreign-born workers have lost employment." It put the matching labor force movements at 1.8 million native-born Americans joining and 881,000 foreign-born workers leaving. It also projected real wage growth of 4.2% for American workers over the administration's first full year, and stated: "Under President Trump, the America First promise is a reality." President Trump (R) is named in the release as the author of the policy.

Brookings described the campaign's rationale in similar terms: it was promoted mainly as labor-market policy, on the premise that removing unauthorized workers opens jobs for Americans. The study says it set out to evaluate that premise.

The record

Brookings compared cities that saw a sharp rise in ICE activity in the first half of 2025 against cities that did not, using arrest records from the Deportation Data Project and employment figures derived from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the federal dataset built from employer payroll tax filings that covers nearly all formal jobs. The study says the design isolates the effect of the enforcement surges and separates it from other candidate causes of job loss, listing tariffs, war, inflation and AI.

Its reported findings:

• The surge cost an estimated 668,000 jobs.
• In the cities with the sharpest rise in ICE arrests, employment ran 0.73% below where it would have been without the surge. In the 51 cities observed at least six months out, it ran 1.48% below.
• Of the 668,000, an estimated 51,000 to 297,000 would have been held by American-born workers.
• Across 86 surge cities, ICE made roughly 52,000 excess arrests. Brookings associates each excess arrest with 13 jobs lost overall, and states that it treats the arrest count "as a proxy for the broader enforcement shock" rather than as a direct tally of jobs destroyed.

On the study's own summary: "Enforcement surges cost jobs, including jobs held by American-born workers."

Brookings offers two mechanisms for why the job losses run well ahead of the arrest count. On the supply side, a workplace that loses a large share of its crew at once cannot recruit and retrain replacements quickly, and the study gives a food processing plant as its example: it cuts production, changes how it operates, or closes. On the demand side, the study says removals also depress local spending, as people, including people with no direct contact with the agency, stay home and buy less.

A second team reached a similar direction with a different model. The Immigration Research Initiative, also comparing otherwise similar areas with and without sudden 2025 increases in ICE activity, reported that per 1,000 ICE arrests of immigrant men there is "a statistically significant 0.54 percent decline in the employment of U.S.-born men," alongside a 2.5% decline in employment among immigrant men.

What the two sets of numbers measure

Analysis. The White House figure and the Brookings figure are not the same kind of quantity, and both can be arithmetically defensible. The release reports levels: how many native-born and foreign-born people held jobs at the start and end of 2025. Brookings reports a difference: how far employment in surge cities fell below where the same cities would have been without the surge, measured off payroll tax records. A national employment level can rise while specific local labor markets lose jobs against their own counterfactual, so the release's count does not by itself answer the question Brookings asks. The passage of the release quoted here reports no unemployment-rate comparison between the two groups.

That rate comparison exists in a separate federal record. Bureau of Labor Statistics release USDL-26-0760, dated May 19, 2026, reports the native-born unemployment rate at 4.3% in 2025, up from 4.0% in 2024, while the foreign-born rate held at 4.2%, unchanged from the year before. Daily Pol could not retrieve the BLS page directly; the figures here are as reproduced by the trade publication Vision Monday, and the release number is given so a reader can check the origin.

Kansas City and Wichita

The Beacon: Kansas City, reporting on the study on August 7, 2026, published the local numbers. Brookings estimated that the two Kansas Citys, Missouri and Kansas, lost 7,986 jobs amid a 93% increase in immigration arrests. Wichita was estimated to have lost 2,240 jobs on a 360% increase in enforcement.

Analysis. The two pairs do not scale with each other. Wichita's arrest increase was nearly four times the increase recorded for the two Kansas Citys, while its estimated job loss is a little over a quarter as large. Brookings publishes its 13-jobs figure as an average across 86 surge cities and explicitly frames the arrest count as a stand-in for the wider shock, so it is not a per-city multiplier. A percentage increase is also measured against each city's own prior arrest baseline, and the figures reproduced here do not give those baselines. The two ratios therefore cannot be read against each other without them.

The Beacon also documented behavior consistent with the demand-side channel Brookings describes. It reported that laborers are starting construction shifts later than usual to avoid agents who began appearing at Kansas City area apartment complexes early in the morning, and that several hundred area immigrants have attended free taillight repair clinics since March to remove a common reason for a traffic stop.

A floor, not a ceiling

Brookings states its own limit plainly: its data end in September 2025, so it captures only the opening months of enforcement, while effects were still building. Two of its figures point the same way over time. In the cities with the sharpest rise in arrests the shortfall was 0.73%; in the 51 cities observed at least six months out it was 1.48%, roughly double. Enforcement did not stop at the data cutoff: The Beacon reported an average of 1,474 arrests per day over the first 11 days of July, from Department of Homeland Security data analyzed by Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University, and Relevant Research's DetentionReports.com.

Prediction. A study extending this comparison design past September 2025 with QCEW-derived employment data will report a national job-loss estimate above 668,000 for the 2025 enforcement surge. Check by June 30, 2027.

Right of reply

This article tests a claim published by the White House and describes enforcement carried out by ICE. Daily Pol has not received a response from either for this piece, and the ledger marks right of reply as required; an editor must document a request for comment to each before publication, and no subject is recorded in the ledger until that request is made. The administration's position appears above in its own words from the January 14, 2026 release. ICE Public Affairs Midwest, in an emailed statement to The Beacon, said "Being in detention is a choice," and said the agency is encouraging targeted immigrants to "take control of their departure" by self-deporting on a free flight booked through the CBP Home App.