Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at the New York Post.
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Much of today’s deportation debate centers on the question of who should count as “criminals” to be immediately sent back to their home countries — with anti-deportation advocates ignoring the huge cost of delay.
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Consider a case from Loudoun County, Va., where police arrested Isaac Melendez-Carranza for allegedly selling fentanyl to two students at Park View HS who then OD’d; only Narcan saved their lives.
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As in high-profile cases from Laken Riley to Sheridan Gorman, this crime is itself an added cost: Melendez-Carranza entered the country illegally and a judge ordered him deported in July 2024 — and (Biden-era) federal immigration authorities encountered him one month later, but let him remain.
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And many Democrats, immigration advocates and media voices insist it’d be wrong to deport him now, based merely on an arrest or pending charges.
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The Department of Homeland Security claims that 70% of illegal aliens have been convicted or charged with a crime (beyond the immigration violation); organizations such as the Cato Institute and Brennan Center, focusing instead on criminal convictions in this country, claim that only about 35% of illegals should count as criminals.
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“A charge is not a conviction,” argues Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Brennan’s senior director for justice; “people are innocent until proven guilty” — again, ignoring the fact that we’re talking about people who’ve already violated US immigration law.
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These advocates’ counts also virtually always exclude illegal immigrants’ criminal histories from their home countries — though, as DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin notes, “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.”
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Now consider the costs of prosecution: Even if Melendez-Carranza accepts a plea bargain, prosecuting such a fentanyl-distribution felony typically runs Virginia taxpayers $50,000 to $100,000 or more — and if he fights the charge and forces a full trial, the trial and jail costs alone could reach $150,000.
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Add in the much larger cost of imprisonment after conviction (since Democrat-run Virginia will almost certainly have Melendez-Carranza serve out his sentence here rather than turning him over to ICE immediately after conviction for deportation): A contested trial leading to a substantial prison term could push taxpayers’ total bill to $600,000 or more.
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Even the less expensive route isn’t cheap: A plea bargain for a relatively short sentence — say, time served plus a year or two years behind bars — can still run the public $150,000.
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And, while being charged with a crime doesn’t guarantee a conviction, conviction is overwhelmingly the outcome.
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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.
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Why should taxpayers have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars prosecuting and incarcerating someone already in the country illegally, rather than deporting him?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
John R. Lott, Jr., “The High Price of Illegal-immigrant Convictions,” New York Post, September 13, 2026.
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