The fear that swept through immigrant neighborhoods when the second Trump administration took office did more than empty sidewalks. It drained more than $1.26 billion from the Chicago area’s economy over the following year, according to new research that tries to put a dollar figure on what happens when people are afraid to leave home.
The report, released this week by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, tracked anonymized cellphone location data across Cook County and found that the ordinary flow of people between immigrant and non-immigrant neighborhoods collapsed almost immediately after January 2025 — and never fully returned. Researchers put the lost retail and restaurant activity at roughly $1.26 billion, with an additional $107 million in forgone state sales-tax revenue, according to WTTW and NPR. Retail visits fell about 9 percent and restaurant visits about 10 percent, declines that held for roughly a year.
“People’s behavior systematically changed after January 20, 2025,” Matt Wilson, a co-author of the study, told NPR. He said the region has yet to recover.
The engine of those losses, the researchers argue, is not mass deportation but something quieter: withdrawal. As families skipped shopping trips, canceled outings and stayed close to home, the spending they would normally have done evaporated — and much of it evaporated in businesses far from any immigrant enclave. That is why Wilson cautioned against treating immigrant neighborhoods as sealed off from the rest of the economy. The location data, he told NPR, show their residents routinely traveling and spending across the county, which is why their retreat is felt in shops and restaurants with no connection to immigration at all.
The Chicago findings arrive as immigration detention has reached record levels.
As of mid-July, ICE held about 65,800 people, and roughly 70 percent of them had no criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which analyzes federal detention data. The Department of Homeland Security has defended its approach: a DHS spokesperson, Lauren Bis, said in a statement to NPR that clearing out people the agency calls criminals leaves neighborhoods safer for local businesses and their customers, and that nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests involve people charged with or convicted of a crime. That figure describes people arrested, however — not those in detention — a distinction department officials have themselves acknowledged.
A Brookings Institution analysis this year found that consumer spending fell about 1.7 percentage points in states with heavy enforcement, in work led by economist Giovanni De Balanzó and colleagues. A University of Pennsylvania Wharton School study estimated weekly foot traffic in heavily targeted areas dropped 2.7 percent and spending 6.2 percent. In Los Angeles, researchers documented spending declines of 20 to 25 percent in some heavily immigrant neighborhoods after enforcement was announced. And in Minneapolis, the city’s updated June assessment put the damage from a sustained sweep known as Operation Metro Surge at nearly $700 million, with small businesses losing more than $81 million in January alone, as reported by NPR — well above an earlier February estimate of about $203 million.
Chicago’s immigrant fabric includes Haitian families, but the study’s lesson travels well beyond any one city — and for Haitian communities across the country, the pressure it describes is compounding.
Even as the same fear keeps people home, many Haitian workers have lost their legal right to work. Temporary Protected Status — a federal designation that lets nationals of countries facing conflict or disaster live and work legally in the United States for a limited time — was terminated for Haiti effective July 27, 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling in Mullin v. Doe cleared the way and a federal judge in Washington lifted an order that had briefly preserved protections, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and court records. The lawsuit challenging the termination has not been dismissed, leaving a thin legal thread unresolved.
The economic weight of that change is national.
Advocacy groups estimate that Haitian TPS holders contribute roughly $5.9 billion a year to the U.S. economy and pay about $1.5 billion in taxes, with some 200,000 in the workforce, according to figures compiled by Fwd.us, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and the UndocuBlack Network. The American Immigration Council, drawing on Census Bureau data, counted about 330,000 Haitian TPS holders as of early 2025 — up from roughly 164,000 two years earlier — and estimated their spending power at about $2.9 billion; roughly 50,000 U.S.-citizen children have at least one parent who holds the status. (Population estimates vary by source and date, and some advocates and members of Congress cite as many as 350,000.) Haitian TPS holders are concentrated in states such as Florida and New York and in metropolitan areas including greater Boston, meaning the loss of work authorization hits a handful of communities at once.
Taken together, researchers and advocates describe a one-two blow for Haitian immigrants: the chilling effect that quietly suppresses spending, layered on top of a sudden loss of the permits that let people earn a living. For Haitian advocates, the economics only sharpen a human argument. “We cannot force people to return to a burning home,” Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said in a statement issued with allied groups, pointing to the gang violence and instability that still grip Haiti.
Cross-party unease has emerged in Washington. House members from both parties moved this year to force a vote on extending Haitian TPS eligibility, Fortune reported, though the outcome remains uncertain. Meanwhile, the Chicago study offers a measure of what the current climate is already costing — a bill, its authors note, that is paid well beyond the neighborhoods’ enforcement targets.
This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
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