Illegal immigration in the United States surged to a record 14 million in 2023, according to a Pew Research Center report. That figure marked a sharp increase from 11.8 million in 2022 and broke the previous high of 12.2 million set in 2007. Numbers rose further in 2024 under Biden’s policies, then began to decline in 2025 under Trump, though the total remains above 14 million.
California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois had the largest concentrations of illegal immigrants, with Texas rapidly catching up to California. Pew estimated that 9.7 million were part of the U.S. workforce in 2023, about 5.6% of all workers, with Nevada, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas recording the highest shares.
The economic impact of illegal immigration is staggering. According to a 2023 study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the gross annual cost of illegal immigration, the total before factoring in taxes paid by illegal aliens, has risen to $182 billion.
Taxes paid by illegal immigrants cover only about 17.2 percent of these costs, leaving American taxpayers with a net burden of $150.7 billion per year. That amounts to $8,776 annually for each illegal immigrant or U.S.-born child of illegal immigrants. On a per-taxpayer basis, illegal immigration costs $1,156 a year, or $957 after accounting for taxes paid by illegal aliens.
These costs have grown sharply. The 2022 totals represented a 30 percent increase over just five years. A previous FAIR study in 2017 estimated the net annual cost at $116 billion, underscoring how quickly the burden has escalated.
The local impact of illegal immigration is especially visible in law enforcement statistics. In Los Angeles County, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide are for illegal aliens, and as many as two-thirds of all fugitive warrants in the county involve illegal aliens.
A Justice Department–funded study conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies in 2008 found that between 25 and 50 percent of gang members arrested in northern and western Virginia were removable aliens, most of them in the country illegally.
Criminal justice costs alone amount to $47 billion annually, not including damages suffered by victims. Healthcare adds further strain. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that “emergency services for undocumented aliens” cost $7 billion in fiscal 2021 and $5.4 billion in 2022. In addition, migrants received at least $8 billion in improper Medicaid payouts.
Beyond the direct fiscal burden, illegal immigration also imposes significant indirect costs on American workers through wage suppression. Academic research led by Harvard economist George Borjas has consistently shown that immigration’s largest negative impact falls on native workers without a high school diploma, a group that makes up a modest but shrinking share of the workforce and includes some of the poorest Americans.
Borjas’ findings suggest that roughly one-third of the 10-percentage-point decline in the relative wage of high school dropouts between 1980 and 1988 can be attributed to the influx of less-skilled immigrants. His broader research indicates that, when averaging wage effects across education levels, the wages of preexisting workers fell by about 3.2 percent in the short run, though effects faded over the long term.
In practical terms, this means that immigration, particularly illegal immigration, disproportionately depresses the wages of low-skilled American workers who are already among the most economically vulnerable.
Educational costs and crime-related expenses are yet another burden shouldered by U.S. taxpayers. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated that during the 2021–2022 school year, 5.1 million public school students, about 6.5 percent of the total, were children of migrants. This influx strains already underfunded school systems, forcing districts to absorb additional costs for instruction, language services, and classroom resources.
The criminal justice system faces its own heavy costs from illegal immigration. U.S. Border Patrol data show consistent arrests of “criminal aliens,” defined as individuals convicted of one or more crimes either in the United States or abroad before interdiction. Over the last decade, approximately 816,000 criminal aliens have been deported from the United States.
The Center for Immigration Studies notes that this figure understates the true burden, since prosecutors sometimes drop charges against non-citizens once ICE signals that deportation is imminent, removing the case from their docket but leaving the underlying crime unpunished.
Liberals often claim that illegal immigrants are good for the nation, or ask, “What harm do they cause?” The answer is clear: they create massive educational and criminal justice costs while suppressing wages. Illegal immigration imposes far-reaching obligations on taxpayers, extending well beyond direct fiscal transfers, government benefits, healthcare, and other forms of support provided by the government.
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Trump ‘was never inappropriate with anybody,’ Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell told DOJ
WASHINGTON — The late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, told Justice Department officials last month that President Trump was “never inappropriate with anybody” in the time the disgraced financier and future commander in chief were friends.
Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted in December 2021 of sex trafficking and conspiracy charges, sat for two days of interviews led by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Tallahassee, Fla., July 24 and 25.
“I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell told Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney, of her interactions with the president when he was a friend of Epstein in the ’90s and early 2000s.
Maxwell, 63, provided virtually no new information on other boldfaced names associated with Epstein, including former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, former Harvard University President Larry Summers, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Audio and transcripts of the interviews were released Friday as the Trump administration seeks to quash rampant speculation about Epstein, who was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell Aug. 10, 2019.
The UK-born Maxwell pushed back on almost every conspiratorial accusation leveled about Epstein since his 2008 guilty plea in Florida to soliciting sex from a minor, which saw him confined for 13 months — much of that time on work release.
Those included allegations that Epstein had a so-called “client list” of rich and influential associates who were either involved with or blackmailed by the investor who operated a shadowy sex trafficking ring that preyed on girls as young as 14.
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Prosecutors secured evidence Comey authorized classified leaks, but declined charges
Declassified bombshell FBI memo undercuts Comey’s testimony to Congress and opens door to new conspiracy probe
Federal prosecutors gathered evidence from James Comey’s top lieutenants that he authorized the leak of classified information to reporters just before the 2016 election but declined to bring criminal charges, according to recently declassified memos that call into question the former FBI director’s testimony to Congress.
The bombshell revelations involving ex-FBI general counsel James Baker and ex-Comey chief of staff James Rybicki were memorialized in documents that FBI Director Kash Patel discovered earlier this year, but the passages were originally redacted by the Justice Department in versions sent to Congress earlier this month.
Attorney General Pam Bondi intervened and eliminated the redactions, dispatching new versions of the memos this week to the House and Senate Judiciary committees, officials told Just the News.
The memos detail evidence and interviews gathered by U.S. Postal Inspection Service agents concerning classified information leaked to The New York Times in October 2016, ahead of the November election in which Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“The USPIS Investigation also revealed Baker disclosed USG [U.S. government] classified information to the NYT under the belief he was ultimately instructed and authorized to do so by then FBI Director James Comey,” one summary memo reads. “For example, during interviews, Baker indicated FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki instructed him (Baker) to disclose the information to the NYT, and Baker understood Rybicki was conveying this instruction and authorization from Comey.”
The memos don’t identify the specific pieces of classified information that were leaked or whether Comey or anyone else was authorized to declassify them for the media. But they were investigated by multiple prosecutors, including the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., under Trump’s first administration and by future-special prosecutor John Durham, and all declined to bring criminal charges, the memos show.
Bondi told Just the News on Thursday she was committed to bringing accountability for the yet unpunished leaks.
“This document produced at my direction confirms what many Americans have long suspected: former FBI Director James Comey and his chief of staff engaged in abhorrent conduct,” she said. “There must be accountability for those who were entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s secrets and failed to do so.”
Comey previously denied during congressional testimony that he had ever been a source in news articles related to the FBI’s investigations into Trump and Clinton and further denied that he had ever approved of anyone else at the FBI being such a source. He has long denied any wrongdoing and insisted he has been politically attacked because he stood up to Trump.
Patel told Just the News the evidence he uncovered raised concerns that one of his predecessors may have authorized illegal leaks and lied about it.
“These newly declassified memos show how former FBI leadership authorized classified leaks and withheld the truth from Congress and the American people,” he said. “Thanks to President Trump’s commitment to transparency, the cover-up is being exposed. The public deserves nothing less than full accountability.”
You can read the declassified FBI memos here:
Declassified FBI Memos – Tropic Vortex Investigation – Baker, Rybicki, and Comey
A recent barrage of declassified documents showing Comey and current Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., may have been behind national security leaks over the last decade designed to harm Trump may prove more than just an exercise in historical accountability.
Legal experts say the statute of limitations for prosecution under espionage laws for leaks back in 2016 or 2017 can be extended to 10 years if the act was knowing and willful and harmed national security or was part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy that continued into the last five years.
“The general federal statute of limitations is five years, but espionage that harms our national interest is 10 years and covering up the crime continues the conspiracy,” explained Mike Davis, a former top Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who now runs the nonprofit Article III Project on constitutional law.
“The Trump DOJ can open up a criminal probe that investigates this malicious disclosure of classified information that harms our national interest,” he said.
Patel recently opened a criminal investigation examining the last decade of U.S. intelligence abuses and political weaponization as an ongoing criminal conspiracy stretching from the now-disgraced Russia conclusion probe to the raid on Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Fla.
Bondi has created a strike force to examine the allegations and authorized the use of grand juries, while one of her top deputies, Harmeet Dhillon, told Just the News one of the crimes that could be charged is the deprivation of civil liberties under color of government authority.
There is also a question of whether Congress was obstructed by false statements and withheld documents.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Comey in May 2017 whether he had “ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation.”
Comey replied, “Never.”
Grassley then asked whether Comey had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation.” Comey again testified, “No.”
When asked whether any classified information “relating to President Trump or his associates” had ever been declassified and shared with journalists, Comey said, “Not to my knowledge.”
“There have been a variety of leaks,” Comey also said at the time. “Leaks are always a problem, but especially in the past three to six months.”
He did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him by Just the News through his personal book website.
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