NEW REPORT: America’s Voice “End the ICE Tax” Finds Florida’s Aggressive Mass Deportation Enforcement Is Driving Up Costs and Emptying Storefronts

New-home construction costs in Florida and other immigrant-reliant states have jumped 13.1 percent since the ICE enforcement surge began, even as permits and construction jobs decline

FLORIDA – Last week, America’s Voice released “End the ICE Tax,” a new national report and campaign documenting how the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is raising prices, costing jobs, and draining local economies, with Florida standing out as a state where enforcement cooperation has deepened the damage.

Key findings from the report include: 

• Orlando restaurants have lost an estimated 40 percent of their revenue as staff quit out of fear, while nursery owners in Homestead report delayed deliveries and idled operations as workers stay home.

• Florida has the second-highest share of immigrant home health aides in the nation, 60 percent, exposing the state’s care workforce just as demand for it is set to surge.

• Florida is one of the five states most reliant on immigrant labor (with California, Nevada, New Jersey, and New York). Since the enforcement surge began, construction employment across those states fell 1.3 percent while the rest of the country grew 3.3 percent.

• Single-family home permits fell 9.2 percent in those same five states between June 2024 and June 2026, while the remaining states saw permits rise 3.0 percent.

• The average cost of building a new home in those same five states jumped 13.1 percent — from $304,312 to $344,112 — over the same period, compared to just 2.0 percent everywhere else.

• Florida holds 31 percent of all 287(g) agreements nationwide, the highest share of any state.

• Miami-Dade County has more pending deportation cases than any jurisdiction in the country, over 146,000 as of August 2025.

• A single six-day operation in Florida in May 2025 resulted in more than 1,100 arrests, the largest one-week, single-state immigration operation in ICE’s history.

To read the full “ICE Tax” report, click here.

The report calls the cost of mass deportation the “ICE Tax”: the price families pay every day because the government is choosing mass deportation led by ICE agents over the economic well-being of everyday Americans. America’s Voice’s new campaign calls on the Trump administration and Congress to reverse course and end the “ICE Tax” by ending the mass deportations that are squeezing American families in every corner of the country.

Statement from Joanna Kuebler, Chief of Programs at America’s Voice:

“Florida families are footing the bill for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s radical and extreme mass deportation agenda. Florida officials have embraced this administration’s mass deportation crusade and Floridians are paying the price. Restaurants in Orlando losing nearly half their revenue, garden nurseries in Homestead sitting idle, construction sites silent and inactive, and home health aides, who make up 60 percent of Florida’s care workforce, swept away just as families need them most.  It’s time for this administration to end the ICE tax and put Florida families ahead of a reckless policy that has driven up costs on everything from groceries to home health care.”

Read about the report in Spanish here.