Trump got $170 billion for immigration. Now he has to enact it.
'It's a whole lot of little contracts with state and local officials. It's building more facilities. It's reopening the ones they already have. And all you need is one choke point in the logistics — every convoy is as fast as the slowest ship,' Cuccinelli said. 'You've got to have the planes, the vehicles, the manpower, the security, in all the right places.'
The domestic policy bill also includes over $1 billion for the immigration court system to hire more judges and staff, but it's unclear how quickly the administration can build out the courts, and whether it can move at a rate that can keep up with an increased pace of ICE arrests — or if the effort will ultimately result in longer detention time.
The Trump administration's efforts to work around the immigration courts have been met with legal challenges. And the case backlog is substantial: roughly 700 immigration judges are coping with a 3.5 million case pile-up.
The funding for immigration judges is 'important as well, because the system is backlogged,' said Michael Hough, director of federal relations at NumbersUSA, a group that works to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. 'Just because you detain these people, especially people who have been here for a while, they need hearings — you've got to get them in front of an immigration judge.'
While the White House celebrates the bill's passage, political pressure is already growing for congressional Republicans to enact new policy. Immigration hawks say the money is crucial, but the party also has to look to legislation that will make permanent changes to the immigration system — such as reviving talks around border security and asylum law from the party's legislation from last year, known as H.R.2.
'There are other legislative changes that Republicans campaigned on, and that we're going to continue to be looking to them to move things forward and not just sit on their hands now that they've passed the Big Beautiful Bill Act,' said a person close to the Trump administration, granted anonymity to speak candidly. 'No, this is a budget reconciliation bill … it's infused a ton of money into this effort, but there's still some policy changes that the administration has talked about and wants to pursue.'
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