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President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will pump tens of billions of dollars into law enforcement, delivering an unprecedented bonanza for the agencies behind the US administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Moments after the bill passed through Congress, the White House boasted that it had made the “largest investment in border security in a generation”, providing “nearly $150bn to secure our border and deport illegal aliens”.
The sum would give US Immigration and Customs Enforcement more money on an annual basis combined over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI; Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the US Marshals Service; and Federal Bureau of Prisons, according to American Immigration Council calculations. It is nearly double the UK’s defence budget.
The bill releases funds to hire 10,000 agents for ICE, 5,000 customs officers and 3,000 border patrol agents.
While Trump touted the bill for its tax cuts, other Republicans have been clear that its main purpose was to finance the aggressive crackdown on migrants.
“Massive tax cuts, especially no tax on tips and overtime,” vice-president JD Vance wrote on X. “And most importantly, big money for border security.”
Analysts said the new money would dwarf the sums provided to other enforcement agencies in the past.
“With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick at the AIC.
Trump promised during his White House campaign last year to launch the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history, saying immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Since he re-entered the White House in January, ICE has deported more than 200,000 people, in a nationwide sweep that has triggered huge protests in more than a dozen large US cities.
Trump implored Republicans to pass his bill earlier this week during a visit to Florida where he touted a new “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility.
According to government data, more than 59,000 people are in ICE custody, the highest number in history. They are held in facilities that human rights activists claim often suffer from overcrowding and poor sanitation.
The American Civil Liberties Union said Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would fund a “dramatic and permanent increase to an immigration detention and deportation apparatus that denies due process and violates human rights”.
“Instead of reining in ICE’s abuses, Congress is throwing the agency billions more to terrorise our communities,” said Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer with the ACLU.
The bill earmarks $46.4bn for operations at the US-Mexico border wall including funds for building checkpoints, training Border Patrol agents and enhancing technology to combat the inflow of illicit narcotics.
It also allocates $45bn to expand ICE’s detention capacity and $29.8bn for its operations, including hiring and training additional enforcement personnel.
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“ICE will now have 13 times its current fiscal budget for detention, which is already operating at a historic high, on top of the funding in ICE’s annual budget that Congress sets each year,” said Silky Shah, head of Detention Watch Network, an NGO.
“The funding windfall, which will radically expand immigrant detention, is an accelerant for the Trump administration’s authoritarianism,” she said.
Prior to the bill’s passage, a group of 20 Catholic bishops wrote an open letter criticising the legislation, saying the mass deportation campaign it financed “will separate US families, harm US citizen and immigrant children, and sow chaos in local communities”.
“It will spur immigration raids across the nation, harming hard-working immigrant families essential to our economy,” they wrote.
