$1.26 Billion Gone: The University Study That Finally Puts a Number on What We Already Knew

We told you this was happening.

In June 2025, Silicon Valley Latino documented what was unfolding in Latino communities across America as immigration enforcement intensified. We wrote about the bakery owner in Boyle Heights who said the raids on her block were "worse than COVID", who lost half her staff of 15 years in a single day. We reached out to community and business leaders to understand what was really happening on the ground.

You can read that full article here: When Resilience Is Raided: The Unseen Toll on Latino Entrepreneurs.

Now the University of Illinois Chicago has put a dollar amount on it.

This report was published on September 8, 2026, just days before National Hispanic Heritage Month begins on September 15. We note the timing not because SVL needs a calendar to celebrate, advocate for, or defend our comunidad. We do that every day of the year. We note it because the contrast could not be sharper. As the country prepares to spend 30 days celebrating Latino culture, food, music, and excellence, a university study quietly drops a number that tells us exactly what this administration's policies have cost the very community being celebrated.

$1.26 billion.

That is the estimated amount of foregone commercial activity just in Cook County, Illinois alone during the first year of heightened immigration enforcement, according to a new study published September 8, 2026, by the Great Cities Institute at UIC. The report, titled Hunkering Down: The Hidden Economic Cost of Federal Immigration Enforcement in Cook County, used anonymous GPS cellphone data to track movement between Latino and non-Latino neighborhoods throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.

What they found confirms everything our community already knew and was feeling in real time.

What the data shows

The research team tracked what they called cross-community trips, visits made by residents of high Latin America-born neighborhoods to retail stores and restaurants in other parts of the county. Before January 20, 2025, these trips were routine. Nearly four in ten visits made by residents of Latino-heavy neighborhoods crossed into other parts of the county. That integration was not a footnote. It was the structural reality of how Latino families lived, shopped, worked, and moved through the broader regional economy.

Within two weeks of the inauguration, those trips began disappearing.

Retail visits fell by roughly 9 percent. Restaurant visits fell by roughly 10 percent. And critically, visits to businesses within Latino neighborhoods remained essentially unchanged.

The Latino community did not stop spending. They stopped traveling to spend.

Professor Matt Wilson, Great Cities Institute, UIC, via NPR, September 8, 2026

When that mobility stopped, it was not the immigrant neighborhoods that suffered most. It was the suburban retail corridors that lost their Latino customers. The suburban retail decline was 2.1 times larger than the decline in Chicago proper.

Essential trips fell too. This was not a budget decision.

One of the most telling findings in the report is that essential trips fell almost as sharply as discretionary ones. Visits to restaurants and retail fell by 9 to 10 percent. But visits to grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, banks, and healthcare providers fell by 7.7 percent.

If the pullback were primarily about tighter household budgets, we would expect discretionary spending to drop far more than essential spending. But the parallel decline suggests something else entirely. As the report states, the essential decline points to fear of traveling through unfamiliar areas rather than to tighter household budgets.

Caridad, Chicago, via NPR, September 8, 2026

That was not an economic calculation. That was fear. And fear, it turns out, costs $1.26 billion.

This is not a Chicago story

The UIC report focused on Cook County because that is where the data existed to measure it rigorously. But the pattern it describes is national.

In Minneapolis, the city estimates total economic damage from ICE enforcement sweeps at nearly $700 million, with small businesses losing more than $81 million in revenue in January 2025 alone.

A Brookings Institution report estimates a roughly 1.7 percentage point decline in aggregate consumer spending in high-enforcement states.

And in our own SVL Latino Business Survey conducted in November and December 2025, before this UIC report existed, business owners across California, Oregon, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina told us the same thing. Immigration enforcement and declining consumer confidence were among the top concerns named by our respondents. Not because they were political opinions. Because they were daily business realities.

Their words told the story the data now confirms. Most respondents reported customers spending less. Many described a visible pullback in foot traffic and purchasing. Several named fear directly as the driver, not budget constraints, not a drop in demand. Fear. The same fear Caridad described in Chicago. The same fear the UIC study measured in $1.26 billion of missing commerce.

What SVL documented on the ground in 2025:

Reuters documented the following on the ground in Los Angeles:

A bakery owner in Boyle Heights: "I built this business over 15 years. I lost half my staff in one day." She called the raids "worse than COVID."

Juan Ibarra, produce market owner: daily revenue fell from $2,000 to $300.

A restaurant owner reported losing $7,000 per week in revenue.

Luis, a hotdog vendor, described a severe and immediate drop in income.

SVL also reached out directly to Barney Santos, Director of Business Development at the LA County Department of Economic Development. He told us:

We documented what was happening on the ground. The University of Illinois Chicago has now documented what it cost. Read our full ground-level reporting: When Resilience Is Raided.

The answer has not changed

The DHS disputed the UIC study's findings, as the White House has disputed every piece of evidence that documents the economic cost of its enforcement policies. That is not a surprise. Power rarely acknowledges the cost it imposes on those without it.

What cannot be disputed is the pattern.

When communities are afraid to leave their homes, local economies contract. When local economies contract, businesses close. When businesses close, jobs disappear. When jobs disappear, tax revenue falls. Cook County lost an estimated $107 million in sales-tax revenue. That money does not exist anywhere else. It was not relocated. It was simply gone.

This is what #EconomicGenocide looks like. Not a slogan. A number. $1.26 billion in one county. In one year.

At Silicon Valley Latino, we have said this from the beginning. Silence is complicity. The evidence keeps arriving, from the streets of East LA, from the bakeries of Boyle Heights, from the markets of Little Village in Chicago, and now from the data labs of the University of Illinois.

The ladder keeps getting cut. We keep building our own.

Every dollar spent at a Latino-owned business is a direct act of counter-pressure against the forces documented in this report. Community investment is not a consolation prize. It is infrastructure. It is resistance. It is how we close the gap that fear and policy keep opening.

Shop: Visit ShopLatino.Market to find and support Latino-owned businesses in your community. Every purchase is solidarity made real.

Share this article: The more people understand the full picture, the stronger our collective response becomes. Send this to someone who needs to read it.

Read the full UIC report: greatcities.uic.edu

Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois Chicago. Hunkering Down: The Hidden Economic Cost of Federal Immigration Enforcement in Cook County, IL. September 8, 2026.

NPR. New report shows the economic toll of ICE raids. September 8, 2026.

Brookings Institution. ICE Enforcement Employment Effects in U.S. Cities.

City of Minneapolis. Economic impact assessment, January 2025.

SVL Latino Business Survey. November through December 2025.

Silicon Valley Latino. When Resilience Is Raided: The Unseen Toll on Latino Entrepreneurs. June 17, 2025.

Reuters. Immigration raids in Los Angeles hit small business owners: It's worse than COVID. June 17, 2025.