President Donald Trump’s spending cuts and border security package would inject roughly $150 billion into his mass deportation agenda over the next four years, funding everything from an extension of the United States’ southern border wall to detention centers to thousands of additional law enforcement staff.
The current annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the government’s primary department for immigration enforcement, is around $10 billion. If the Republican president’s big bill passes in Congress, the immense cash infusion could reshape America’s immigration system by expanding the law enforcement and detention network while increasing costs to legally immigrate to the U.S.
The bill, which top White House aide and immigration hawk Stephen Miller has called “the most essential piece of legislation currently under consideration in the entire Western World,” sets aside $45 billion to expand the network of immigrant detention facilities for adult migrants and families.
The standards in adult facilities, the bill notes, would be set at “the sole discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”
More than $12 billion was also requested for 18,000 new ICE and Border Patrol personnel.
THE IMPACT: ICE has said it wants to increase its current detention capacity from about 41,000 people to 100,000. It’s part of what ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, has suggested is a deportation system that could function “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours.”
ICE currently has about 6,000 deportation officers, a number that’s been stagnant for years.
While expanding staff and detention centers would make it easier for the administration to increase deportations, even the tens of billions of dollars the bill requests may not be enough to meet Trump’s goals. Miller has said ICE should be making 3,000 arrests per day of people in the country illegally. That’s a vast increase over the roughly 650 arrested a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term.