Deport Illegal Aliens. Save the Environment

Mass migration adds more carbon than all the solar panels and EVs could cut.

Americans have been told that deporting illegal aliens is racist, and now that it’s even bad for the planet, but the actual numbers show that if liberals were serious about saving the planet, they wouldn’t be protesting ICE, they’d be protesting for it and even joining it in huge numbers.

According to Human Rights First (HRF), an organization formerly known as The Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, a spinoff of The International League for Human Rights, which was in turn a spinoff of the Human Rights League: a French Communist front group, all the flights carrying deported illegal aliens are causing even more global warming.

“Climate change is a driver of migration,” Brett Heinz, with the American Friends Service Committee, whose history of Communist ties goes back a century, complained. “The United States is accelerating climate change in an attempt to remove these immigrants seems like a vicious cycle in a very real way, where we are creating more undocumented immigrants through this pollution.”

But what’s the carbon footprint of millions of illegal aliens traveling thousands of miles to enter the United States in the first place?

Migrant invaders to the United States come from different places, traveling from between 500 miles out of Mexico to over 8,000 miles from China or Afghanistan. Some move overland while others use a combination of air, sea and land travels amounting to between 150 to 1,250 kilograms of CO2. 1 million migrants produce between 200,000 to 1,000,000 metric tons of CO2. Under Biden, around 11 million migrants tried to invade the United States for a grand total of between 2,200,000 and 11,000,000 million metric tons of CO₂ .

That’s a Godzilla sized carbon footprint.

By comparison the open borders lobby is complaining that the deportation flights produced 370,240 tons of CO2 or a mere 3.37% of the ‘carbon emissions’ produced by the mass invasion of illegal aliens during the Biden administration.

Environmentalists complain about melting ice caps, but it turns out ICE is saving the planet.

Deportation creates a vital deterrent effect. Every illegal alien deported prevents tens of thousands more from trying to enter the United States. The number of migrant encounters at the southern border dropped from over 2 million in 2023 and 1.5 million in 2024 to 237,538 in 2025 and so far only 51,000 in 2026 due to the aggressive deportation policy under the Trump administration. The carbon savings from Trump’s deportations deterrent factor is huge.

The drop in mass migration between 2023 and 2025 amounts to a net carbon savings of between 271,245 and 2,260,375 metric tons of CO2. If the numbers for 2026 hold steady, then the net carbon savings for the year rise to between 293,581 and 2,446,508 metric tons.

It would take over 21 square miles or 13,980 acres of utility-scale solar panels to achieve the same effect. That’s the equivalent of covering the entire island of Manhattan or 10,575 football fields with solar panels to achieve the same carbon reduction that Trump’s deportations did.

This just accounts for the drop in illegal alien invasions between the Biden and Trump years, it doesn’t account for the growth in invasions had the border stayed open. In one survey, over 100 million people wanted to move to the United States. That’s more than ten times the number who did invade under Biden resulting in between 20,000,000 and 100,000,000 metric tons of CO₂.

It would take almost 140,000 acres of solar panels, or approaching a third of the country’s solar capacity, to account for the savings from President Trump’s deportation deterrents.

But the journeys of migrant invaders represent only a fraction of their environmental impact (never mind the incredible actual environmental damage that they engage in along the way, ravaging Mexico’s landscape and leaving filth in their wake) once they reach the United States.

The average American’s carbon footprint is 4 times the size of a Mexican’s carbon footprint, 5 times that of a Venezuelan’s, 12 times that of a Guatemalan’s, 15 times that of a Nicaraguan, 45 times that of a Haitian’s and 60 times that of a migrant from Afghanistan.

Calculating just the migrant encounters from 2023, assuming that the migrant invaders remained in the United States, that added 24 to 28 million metric tons CO₂ annually.

That’s every year they’re not deported.

And open borders activists are complaining about a mere 370,240 tons of carbon emissions from deportation flights.

An extensive campaign of lawfare has been fought to keep Haitians from being deported back to their country, but the 124,000 Haitians from 2023 remaining in the United States are adding 1.32 million metric tons CO₂ to the ‘planet’ every year that they remain here.

Every year that Mexican migrants who invaded America in 2023 remain undeported adds 5.7 million metric tons of CO₂ and every year that Guatemalans from 2023 are still not deported contributes nearly 3 million metric tons of CO₂.

To put that into perspective, New York City banned plastic bags, creating massive amounts of difficulty and inconvenience, just to save less than half a million metric tons of CO₂. The city of Austin, Texas, mandated solar panels on new buildings to save around 100,000 tons annually. There are similar figures for Chicago and New York City.

If they really wanted to cut CO₂ emissions, they’d be turning in every illegal alien to ICE.

The total solar residential capacity in the United States reduces 37 million metric tons of CO₂. The Biden open borders invasion continues to add between 50 million to 85 million metric tons of CO₂ every single year with a cumulative impact of as high as 600 million metric tons.

What that means is that we could tear down every single residential solar panel, legalize plastic bags and anything else because all those environmental austerity measures don’t even come close to the nuclear impact of mass migration. The annual savings from every single electric car and vehicle in the country is between 10 to 25 million metric tons of CO₂.

All of that was undone by just one single year of Biden’s open borders mass migration.

We wouldn’t need a single electric car or solar panel, if we just secured the border.

If liberals really believed that carbon emissions were on the verge of destroying the planet, they wouldn’t be protesting ICE, they would be joining it. Environmentalists would be rallying in the streets of every major city, demanding that ICE deport more migrants and move them out faster.

And once upon a time, environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, opposed open borders because of the environmental impact. Now Ben Jealous, former NAACP CEO, and until last year the executive director of the Sierra Club, was on the board of Human Rights First.

But the numbers are clear. Anyone who truly wants to cut carbon emissions, has to support an end to mass migration and mass deportations. Anything else is just ‘destroying the planet’.

Save the planet. Deport illegal aliens.

(* Carbon is not a pollutant. The notion of a carbon footprint is an Orwellian absurdity.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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