Congress Throws More Money at Removing Immigrants than Most Countries Spend on Their Armies

Yahoo

3 days ago

It's hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country's immigration enforcement infrastructure.
The Bureau of Prisons? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The Marine Corps? Bigger even than that, by some estimates.
All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council and TPM's own read of the legislation. ICE, responsible for enforcement, detentions, and removals, will oversee much of the spending.
The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.
'It's going to get really scary,' Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, told TPM. 'I do think that we are in a place where the Trump administration is centering a lot of the law enforcement authority of the federal government into the Department of Homeland Security.'
Take this example of how the legislation ranks which parts of the immigration system are important.
The bill gives ICE $29.8 billion to hire new staff and conduct deportations. That will lead to a hiring spurt of deportation officers; an additional $4.1 billion bump goes to Customs and Border Protection for new personnel.
For immigration detention, also overseen by ICE, the bill allocates a whopping $45 billion.
If that's not enough, there's more: Remember the wall? It was Trump's big immigration-related promise during the 2016 campaign. It didn't get built during his first term (and Mexico never paid for it, as Trump promised). Congress allocated $46.5 billion for its construction in this legislation. (A Senate source tells TPM that this, too, was drafted in such a way as to be fungible, so it could be used for building detention facilities as well.)
It's a headspinning increase from ICE's 2024 funding, that, per a recent CRS report, stood at $9.9 billion.
At the same time, the bill adds only a modest number of immigration judges, capping the number at 800 starting in November 2028 — an increase from the current approximately 700.
Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, cast the funding surge last week in the administration's favored light: a means of evicting criminal aliens from the country. The operation that the numbers envision goes far beyond that; Homan complained that, at current funding levels, the country only has between five and six thousand deportation officers.
'More agents means more bad guys arrested, taken off the streets of this country every single day,' he said of the new funding. 'Every day we arrest a public safety threat or national security threat, that makes this country much safer. Who the hell would be against that?'
To Homan, the Trump administration, and its allies in the right-wing media, every undocumented immigrant apprehended and removed is a criminal alien. It's how they cast the Alien Enemies Act removals, even though a 60 Minutes analysis found that around three-quarters of those removed had no documented criminal background.
The point is mostly to justify the massive scale of the resources now being marshaled to detain and eject immigrants. This is all new money to be added on top of that which Congress has already marked for immigration enforcement. Under this legislation, ICE will receive a budget for detention alone that's more than two-thirds larger than that of the federal prison system. The bill also makes a $10 billion slush fund available to the Secretary of Homeland Security, currently Kristi Noem, for reimbursing 'costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security's mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.'
Absent the constant claim, expressed by Homan and others, that undocumented immigrants present a criminal threat beyond the administrative violation of crossing the border, there's little argument for this level of spending.
Orozco, the Immigration Council attorney, said that more than half of those currently in immigration detention had no criminal record.
'It's a lie that they're trying to use these resources just for folks with, with serious criminal histories,' he said.
For the past five months, immigration enforcement has been the focus of the Trump administration's most egregious abuses of civil liberties. Removing people to El Salvador's CECOT without a hearing; using the military to intimidate anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. It's the tipping point of the spear for much of the current administration's authoritarian impulses.
Because of this, that's about to get a lot bigger.