Los Angeles County spent nearly eight months building a paper trail on exactly what federal immigration enforcement cost its economy. The result, released by the county's Department of Economic Opportunity on February 9, 2026, is one of the most detailed local accountings of an immigration crackdown's economic fallout that any U.S. government body has produced to date.
Houston and Chicago lived through their own versions of the same disruption in 2025 — arrest surges, empty storefronts, National Guard deployments. Neither city has commissioned anything close to LA's study. But enough federal, state and university data now exists on both metro areas to sketch what a comparable accounting would look like, and why the documentation gap matters.
$253.9 Billion Is What Los Angeles Actually Measured
The motion behind the study came from Supervisors Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn; the analysis itself was carried out by the LA County Economic Development Corporation's Institute for Applied Economics. Their conclusion: the county's roughly 948,700 undocumented workers generate an estimated $253.9 billion in annual economic output, about 17% of the county's total economic activity, and support more than 1.06 million jobs once indirect effects are counted. Drawing on USC Equity Research Institute data, researchers found undocumented workers concentrated in retail trade (23.4%), construction (16.2%), other services (14.5%) and manufacturing (13.3%) — four industries accounting for nearly two-thirds of all undocumented employment countywide.
From there, the researchers quantified the disruption itself. A countywide business survey found 82% of respondents reported negative effects from enforcement activity, and 44% of those saw revenue fall by more than half. The nightly curfew imposed on downtown LA from June 10–16, 2025, following protests over federal raids, cost an estimated $840 million in lost economic output and nearly 4,000 job-years of employment under the report's baseline scenario. A separate policy brief from University of California, Irvine and University of Illinois Chicago researchers, using cellphone location and consumer-spending data, found that Los Angeles and Orange counties combined lost more than $625 million in retail sales and nearly $60 million in sales tax revenue in the eight weeks following a mid-May 2025 operation.
Crucially, the county's report didn't confine the damage to immigrant workers alone. Its authors concluded the disruption hit citizens and noncitizens alike, dragging down tax collections at every level of government — county, state and federal.
Houston's Larger, Less-Documented Workforce
No Texas county or state agency has built an equivalent model for Houston, even though Harris County's undocumented population is larger in absolute terms than the population LA County's report measured. The Migration Policy Institute's mid-2023 estimates put Harris County's unauthorized population at roughly 610,000 — the second-largest county concentration in the country, trailing only Los Angeles County's 1.1 million.
Of Harris County's unauthorized population, an estimated 385,000 are working, a labor force participation rate of 63%, according to the Kinder Institute for Urban Research's analysis of MPI data. Nationally, MPI's 2023 figures show construction absorbing the largest share of unauthorized workers at 22%, with food services second at 10% — a pattern a city of Houston workforce profile found holds locally, with construction historically the region's single largest employer of undocumented residents.
The disruption in Houston has been concrete and dated. ICE's own numbers show a seven-day operation in early May 2025 resulted in 422 arrests and 528 deportations in and around the city; a second operation that October ran ten days and produced more than 1,500 arrests, per Houston Public Media's tracking of ICE activity statewide. That May timing lines up with a separate, more rigorous accounting: a Brookings Institution study comparing employment trends across 86 surge cities found Houston's ICE arrest rate jumped 1,578% starting that month, and modeled that if the region's job losses matched the average found nationally, Houston would have shed roughly 23,900 jobs in the following months — a figure Brookings is explicit is modeled from citywide averages, not directly observed.
Contractors are already describing the labor gap in real terms. Foreign-born noncitizens make up 38.6% of Houston's construction workforce, the highest share of any local industry, according to an Axios analysis of Census Bureau data; small firms are seeing project delays and workforce gaps deepen as enforcement intensifies. A Dallas Fed survey of Texas businesses found roughly one in five expect immigration policy to hamper their ability to hire or retain foreign-born workers in 2025 — and the bank's own researchers caution that figure likely understates the true impact, since the survey excludes construction and agriculture, two of the sectors most reliant on undocumented labor.
On tax revenue, the numbers Houston officials cite are statewide rather than county-specific. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates undocumented immigrants contribute roughly $4.9 billion a year in Texas state and local taxes. Dan Potter, who leads survey research at the Houston Population Research Center, put it more narrowly: "at least $2.4 billion" annually, with roughly a quarter of that population living in the Houston area — implying about $600 million flows from the region alone, though no county agency has formally adopted that estimate the way LA County adopted its own study.
Chicago's Operation Midway Blitz, Priced in Fragments
Cook County's undocumented population, an estimated 369,000 as of mid-2023, is the third-largest of any U.S. county — smaller than Houston's or LA's, but concentrated in a compact urban core that made this fall's federal operation especially visible. "Operation Midway Blitz," the enforcement surge that began in Chicago in September 2025, prompted Governor JB Pritzker's office to publish its own economic accounting in December — closer in spirit to LA's report than anything Houston has produced, though far narrower in scope.
The governor's office cited data showing Illinois's immigrant entrepreneurs operate more than 146,000 businesses generating close to $3.8 billion in business income, and pointed to Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, which the governor's office said generates roughly $1 billion in annual sales. A separate WTTW News report put the same corridor's annual sales closer to $900 million, citing the Little Village Chamber of Commerce — a reminder that even basic baseline figures for the same neighborhood vary by source and by year measured. Both accounts agree many Little Village businesses saw revenue drop by as much as 50% year-over-year once the operation began.
The state also tallied the cost of the federal response itself, though even those numbers diverge: Senator Dick Durbin's office estimated the 60-day deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois cost $19.4 million, or roughly $323,000 a day, while an independent analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies put total spending for a narrower window, October 4 through November 15, at $12.8 million. The gap likely reflects the different time periods measured rather than a factual dispute, but no single, reconciled figure exists.
Brookings' same city-level model that flagged Houston's surge shows Chicago's ICE arrest rate rose 326% starting in April 2025, and estimates the region could have shed roughly 32,678 jobs in the months that followed — again a modeled, not directly observed, figure. Illinois's construction industry offers a sense of scale: foreign-born workers make up 32.5% of the construction workforce in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro area, 83,522 people, according to Census figures cited by the Chicago Sun-Times, with immigrants accounting for roughly a quarter of Illinois's construction labor force statewide.
The human toll shows up in numbers state officials tracked closely: 911 calls from Little Village dropped 21% during the operation, and roughly 14,000 students at predominantly Latino schools — about 12% of that population — stayed home the Monday after federal agents marched through downtown Chicago in late September. "This is not sustainable," said Everado Garcia, co-owner of Del Toro restaurant in Pilsen, describing the toll two months into the operation to CBS News Chicago.
Illinois's statewide tax figure, drawn from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, puts undocumented immigrants' annual state and local contribution at $1.5 billion — smaller than California's or Texas's, reflecting the state's smaller undocumented population, but not broken down to the Cook County or city level the way LA County broke its own number down.
The Same Pattern, Different Industries
Line the three metro areas up and a pattern emerges that no single city's data fully captures on its own. LA County's undocumented workforce leans hardest into retail trade; Houston's and Chicago's lean hardest into construction, matching national MPI data showing construction is the single largest employer of unauthorized workers in the country. That distinction shapes how enforcement ripples through each local economy: retail-sector disruption shows up fastest in foot traffic and consumer spending, the channel LA's curfew study and the UC Irvine sales-tax analysis both measured, while construction-sector disruption shows up in stalled permits, delayed closings and rising costs — the channel Houston contractors and Chicago's building trades are already describing.
What's Still Missing
Los Angeles County's report exists because a Board of Supervisors motion ordered it, funded it and required monthly updates for six months. Houston and Chicago have generated plenty of raw material for an equivalent study — MPI population data, Brookings' employment modeling, Federal Reserve business surveys, state tax estimates — but no county government in either city has stitched that material into the kind of formal, IMPLAN-modeled accounting LA County produced. In April 2026, Harris County Commissioners Court began discussing a proposal to review how local law enforcement agencies interact with ICE, though that effort is a policy review, not an economic accounting on LA's scale. Until one exists, the true cost of 2025's enforcement surge in the nation's second- and third-largest undocumented-population counties will remain an estimate assembled from fragments, not a government-certified figure.
