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.
