Washington, DC — Today, House Small Business Committee Ranking Member Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) released a staff report detailing how the Trump Administration’s intensified immigration crackdown is harming immigrant entrepreneurs and weakening local economies nationwide.
The report, The Dying American Dream and the Trump Administration, Part I: Immigrant Entrepreneurs, outlines how aggressive ICE raids, mass detentions, and sweeping enforcement actions are destabilizing small businesses by incapacitating owners, scaring away customers, diminishing the workforce, and limiting access to capital.
“Immigrants start businesses at higher rates than anyone else. When the Trump Administration targets them with chaos and cruelty, they are not only tearing apart families, they are gutting America’s small business economy,” said Velázquez. “This campaign is destroying jobs, suppressing innovation, and draining vitality from Main Street communities across the country.”
For decades, immigrants have started businesses at higher rates than U.S. born individuals and played an essential role in the transportation, food service, construction, health care, retail, and professional services sectors. Yet the Trump Administration’s goal of 3,000 ICE arrests per day—triple previous enforcement levels—has unleashed unprecedented raids, detentions, and deportations affecting not only undocumented immigrants but also visa holders, green-card holders, refugees, DACA recipients, and even U.S. citizens.
Key findings of the Report include:
- Decapitating Small Business Leadership: ICE raids are detaining immigrant business owners across the country, leaving firms without leadership and forcing temporary or permanent closures.
- Cratering Small Business Sales: Fear of ICE presence has decreased foot traffic in immigrant business corridors, driving sharp declines in sales as customers—regardless of status—stay home.
- Abducting Main Street Workers: ICE sweeps are removing essential workers from retail, food service, hospitality, construction, agriculture, and other sectors that rely on immigrant labor.
- Lowering Capital Access: Immigrant entrepreneurs are withdrawing from SBA programs out of fear that personal information could be shared with immigration authorities, worsening long-standing disparities in accessing capital.
- Dangerously Escalating Petty and Hate Crime: ICE’s masked, unaccountable enforcement tactics have emboldened criminals impersonating agents and fueled hate-motivated harassment against immigrants and small business owners.
The report also highlights that the Administration is spending an estimated $88 billion annually on immigration enforcement. Funding that could otherwise support small business lending, crime prevention, health care, education, or infrastructure. Instead, taxpayer dollars are being funneled into mass-detention operations that weaken local economies and undermine national prosperity.
Click here for a full copy of the report.
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