MIAMI — As many as one in 20 Floridians, a million people, could be expelled from the country under a mass deportation plan that is a cornerstone of former president Donald Trump’s campaign, according to a report released by a Washington think tank and immigration advocacy group.

The American Immigration Council, based in Washington D.C., put numbers to Trump’s sweeping plan to deport 13.3 million undocumented or otherwise removable immigrants in the United States should he return to the White House. The immigration advocacy think tank found that the policy would be economically devastating for Florida, one of the states with the largest foreign-born populations, as well as for the country overall.

A one-time mass deportation campaign to expel millions from the country would cost at minimum $315 billion, the researchers found. But the group emphasized that this was a conservative estimate and that the ramifications would go far beyond the cost of the operation, which Trump has said would involve detention camps.

Millions of families would be separated, existing job shortages would get worse, and the U.S. economy would shrink, the report, published on Oct. 2. said.

The annual U.S. GDP could drop by as much as 6.8%, according to the report, while government tax coffers that pay for schools and other critical services would also take a hit. Undocumented immigrants paid nearly $70 billion in local, state, and federal taxes in 2022, the researchers found.

“Our analysis shows the vital role that undocumented immigrants play in the U.S. as workers, taxpayers, and consumers and if they were to be deported we would see a major shock to the U.S. labor force that will lead to a reduction in the U.S. GDP,” said Nan Wu, the American Immigration Council’s research director.

And while undocumented immigrants cannot tap into federal social-safety net programs such as Social Security and Medicare, those programs would lose out on tens of billions of dollars in tax contributions should undocumented immigrants be deported.

“Not getting the payments from those immigrants will make it increasingly difficult to keep those social safety net programs solvent,” said Wu. The U.S. population of people aged 65 or over has grown rapidly over the last decade.

The report also found that Florida would lose about 5% of its population, or about 1 million undocumented residents. That would mean that several key industries, like agriculture and construction, would run into serious troubles with job shortages and rocketing inflation, Wu said.

To arrive at the findings, the researchers used Census Bureau data as well as other federal government statistics. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that between 2018 and 2012, the vast majority of the country’s undocumented immigrants had been in the United States for a decade or longer. Previous estimates in the last decade have also suggested that Florida’s undocumented population is between 590,000 and 775,000.

“The majority have been in the country for a long time,” Wu said, “building their lives, having families and contributing to their communities.”

The Trump campaign has not previously responded to specific questions from the Miami Herald about how a mass deportation campaign would work. But in a statement from May, one of its spokespeople said that “the millions of illegals Biden has resettled across America should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”

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