Fifty-Nine Million, Conservatively
A Chicago Tribune review of court filings, databases, and public records puts the federal cost of Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration enforcement surge in Illinois, at at least fifty-nine million dollars over four months — a back-of-the-envelope figure DHS declined to confirm or contest.
#predatory capital #official narrative
Federal officials have repeatedly declined to provide a cost accounting for Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration enforcement surge that began in Illinois in early September. The Chicago Tribune assembled a conservative estimate from court filings, databases, and other public records: at least fifty-nine million dollars deployed and detained roughly forty-five hundred people through early January — covering personnel deployment, equipment, and facility costs. DHS declined to refute the figure when asked, instead pivoting to language about “convicted murderers, rapists, child abusers” and the “uncalculatable” value of “American lives saved.”
The figure is noteworthy in two ways. First, the per-arrest cost (roughly thirteen thousand dollars) is large for an enforcement operation that consists primarily of street-level civil arrests rather than complex investigations. Second, it is conservative — the Tribune’s review explicitly understates by omitting categories the federal government has refused to disclose. The actual figure is higher; it is also a figure DHS has never been willing to put on a page in a press release.