What would it cost to deport undocumented migrants with due process?

Happy National Immigrant Heritage Month to those who celebrate.

My lawyer friends are generally in favor of anything that leads to more fees for lawyers. They all support gay marriage, for example, because no attorney can collect $1000/hr to handle a gay divorce unless there has first been a gay marriage (see “I Got Gay Married. I Got Gay Divorced. I Regret Both.” (NYT) for how attorneys mined out the life savings of two women, something that wouldn’t previously have been possible).

Recently, the more deplorable of these lawyers have been saying “I want all undocumented migrants deported, but only with due process.” By “due process” they mean the kind of full-scale trial that we would normally hold for someone accused of a crime (in most cases, though, neither the government nor the defendant can afford to go to trial so the result is plea bargaining). Democrat lawyers agree. They want a trial for each migrant, but with the outcome being that the precious migrant can stay in the U.S. forever.

Let’s see how much work would be generated for attorneys if we subscribed to this plan.

There won’t be any plea bargaining because there is no possibility of compromise in the binary decision of citizenship/expulsion. Every case will, therefore, go to trial. Every case will involve complicated facts, typically requiring travel to a foreign country to investigate, e.g., what was happening circa 2010 with the pupusa stand that purportedly resulted in Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia being targeted for death by Salvadoran gangs (CNN). So let’s assume 1,000 hours of attorney time for the prosecution and the same 1,000 hours for the defense all the way through trial. The additional lawyers who must be paid include the judges and their clerks (another 300 hours per case, perhaps). The costs of running the courthouse, the admin staff, the security guards, and the court reporters will be folded into an hourly fee, as will the costs of running the prosecution and defense law firms. Let’s assume $300 per attorney-hour as the full cost including all of these admin and support expenses. Each undocumented migrant who goes through the due process that my attorney friends envision will thus consume 2300*$300 = $690,000 in fees. That’s a lot less than the cost of handling a federal criminal court charge (I learned in 2013 that it would cost $1.5 million in 2013 dollars for a proper defense; adjusted for Bidenflation that would be $2.5 million? Then the prosecution would spent money and also the court itself, so perhaps $4 million total?) so it seems like this is the smallest conceivable number.

How many undocumented migrants are there in the U.S. today? For about 30 years we’ve been hearing “11 million”. Yale found 22 million in 2016:

Given the open border of the Biden-Harris years, therefore, there should be at least 30 million (undocumented migrant) candidates for due process. Multiplying out 30 million times $690,000 results in a total cost to U.S. taxpayers of $20 trillion. For reference, the current national debt is about $37 trillion (source), though that understates our indebtedness because it doesn’t count state and local pension obligations, forecast future Medicare and Social Security costs, etc. The current annual US GDP is about $28 trillion.