The American Immigration Council does not endorse or oppose candidates for elected office. We aim to provide analysis regarding the implications of the election on the U.S. immigration system.
Early Friday morning, the Senate is expected to begin the process for passing a budget reconciliation bill, a somewhat obscure Congressional procedure which allows a funding bill to pass both houses of Congress with only a simple majority threshold — avoiding a 60-vote filibuster obstacle in the Senate. The Senate deal will reportedly include at least an unprecedented $175 billion for immigration and border enforcement, nearly six times the latest annual budget of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) combined. While exact details are yet to be set, in order to pay for this staggering amount, the plan calls for sweeping cuts to essential programs, including potentially Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and more.
Providing at least $175 billion to immigration and border enforcement would be unprecedented . For context, in the two decades since the U.S Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003, Congress has provided an estimated combined total of $409 billion for ICE and CBP. Now Congress is poised to increase that amount by nearly 43% in a single bill. This will line the pockets of private prison companies that run the detention facilities and manage ankle monitors used in mass deportation.
Funding to that level could transform the capacity of the United States to carry out enforcement and to detain immigrants facing removal. In Fiscal Year 2024, ICE’s entire budget was just under $8.5 billion, with a record $3.4 billion set aside for immigration detention, enough to jail 41,500 people at any given time. Even if only a fraction of the $175 billion was set aside for detention, it could potentially be enough to fund a doubling or tripling of current capacity, giving the Trump administration the ability to lease tens of thousands of new detention beds in pre-existing facilities and build dozens of sprawling new detention camps throughout the United States.
This expansion in capacity is exactly what Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has called for. He is seeking at least enough funding to detain 100,000 people at any given time, including the construction of at least four new detention camps holding upwards of 10,000 people at any given time, and more than a dozen smaller detention camps holding 700 to 1,000 people. It would also permit the agency to hire tens of thousands of new law enforcement agents, build hundreds of miles of new border wall, and create a surveillance infrastructure establishing a “papers, please” system throughout the United States. Given how much fear the Trump administration is already creating with the resources available now, it’s hard to imagine how much this level of funding could transform the United States and its relationship with the immigrants who live here.
To pay for this detention and enforcement bonanza, as well as planned tax cuts and other GOP priorities, Congress is reportedly considering slashing services across the government, seeking at least $4 billion in total cuts. While President Trump has said that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid or Medicare, Republican leaders acknowledged that to reach the level of spending cuts required to keep their budget deal deficit neutral would likely require extensive cuts to Medicaid. And spending at least $175 billion on immigration enforcement would necessarily mean cutting other government services. For example, one proposed cut to pay for immigration enforcement is reportedly the elimination of a Biden-era rule requiring nursing homes to increase staffing levels to qualify for Medicaid.
These dramatic tradeoffs would hurt all Americans and immigrant communities around the country. Trump’s immigration enforcement policies are already bleeding taxpayers with unnecessary expenses, including deportations on military planes costing up to $3 million per flight. As research from the American Immigration Council shows, mass deportations are extraordinarily costly and will lead to significant harm to the economy, leading to job losses and hardships for everyday Americans. Rather than supercharging an already powerful immigration enforcement system, we should focus on creating an immigration system that is fair, fast, and functional, and instead use this funding to invest in our communities to help them grow. We should not spend away our futures to carry out Trump’s mass deportation goals.
