Masked immigration enforcers have swept through American cities in the months since President Donald Trump took office, using flash bangs during restaurant sweeps, slamming people’s heads into the ground, violently arresting gardeners on video, and provoking mass protests against their raids. This may only be the beginning.
The massive Senate budget bill, which passed on Tuesday and awaits a final House vote, gives Donald Trump’s administration the money to rapidly ramp up mass deportation to unprecedented levels, according to immigration experts.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have a budget for more officers than the FBI. The nation’s immigration detention centers will have more funding than the federal Bureau of Prisons.
There may be only one limit on how fast the Trump administration can spend: how quickly it can hire.
“It is hard for people to imagine what immigration enforcement is going to look like once all this money goes,” said Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank. “It already looks really bad and scary, like we’re turning into a police state and surveillance state. The orders of magnitude are going to be multiplied.”
Incentive to Spend
The dueling House and Senate bills differ on details but agreed on a key point: Both would massively expand federal spending on immigration enforcement.
Overall, the Senate version will dedicate $175 billion to an immigration crackdown, including an extra $30 billion for ICE, which can be spent over four years. To put that in perspective, ICE’s current budget is about $8 billion per year.
The bill also designates $45 billion for detention facilities, which can also be spent at any time over the next four years. By comparison, the U.S. spends about $8 billion a year on the Bureau of Prisons.
Although the Senate budget bill contains a dizzying array of provisions, ranging from tax breaks for the wealthy to massive cuts to Medicaid, Vice President JD Vance argued Monday that immigration is the main reason to pass it.
“Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he said.
The bill will give Trump years to spend the money, but observers predict that Trump will try to move quickly to hire more ICE agents, convert unused state prisons into detention centers, and hire pilots for deportation flights.
The overall goal will be to create a new baseline — measured in terms of dollars, detentions, and deportations — that will be difficult for future presidents and Congresses to pare back.
“The incentive is to move quickly through that money, get the new system of internment camps that is going to go up around the country up and running,” Costa said.
“They are already spending the money as irresponsibly as you possibly could.”
Another reason the administration is likely to spend the money quickly: It is already deep in the hole on this year’s immigration budget. ICE is $1 billion overbudget by one estimate, Axios reported last month.
“If they don’t get this money, then they are going to have to be releasing tons of people from detention and scaling back operations,” said David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. “They are already spending the money as irresponsibly as you possibly could. So I have no doubt they will spend the money as quickly as they possibly can.”
Arresting Everyone
Since Trump took office, ICE has shifted its tactics, arresting more immigrants without criminal convictions to meet a new goal, announced by White House adviser Stephen Miller in May, of 3,000 arrests a day.
Miller, according to the Wall Street Journal, directed ICE officials to target immigrants at Home Depots and other gathering places for undocumented workers.
ICE is already holding a record 59,000 people in detention, a 50 percent increase from the end of the Biden administration.
Only about 40 percent of people ICE has detained since Trump took office had criminal convictions of any type, and only 8.4 percent had convictions for violent crimes, according to CBS News.
Bier predicted that with more cash in hand, the administration will double down on its current tactics and introduce new ones to meet arrest targets.
“We are going to see Border Patrol checkpoints way in the interior of the United States.”
“Really, when you look at what they have to do in order to increase arrests, they have to go out on the streets and racially profile people. And that is what they have been doing at work sites, on the streets, at Home Depot,” he said. “We are going to see Border Patrol checkpoints way in the interior of the United States. This is going to be something quite unlike anything we have seen in the history of the United States.”
The White House called the idea that ICE is engaging in racial profiling a smear against “heroic ICE officers.”
“President Trump promised the largest mass deportation operation in history and a secure … border — the CATO Institute may disagree with that policy, but the American people don’t,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “While the President has already been extraordinarily successful on securing the border and deporting illegal aliens, the One Big Beautiful Bill is critical to fortify his success and make the progress permanent by: finishing the border wall, detaining and deporting at least one million illegal aliens every year, massively expanding our detention capacity, and hiring additional Border Patrol and ICE agents.”
Hiring Bottleneck
Immigration experts say the Senate and House bills pave the way for the Trump administration to spend the new funding quickly. The biggest problem the White House could face is hiring enough people to staff agencies such as ICE.
“The biggest issue is just manpower. There just aren’t enough people who can do those jobs,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said she would like to add 10,000 officers to ICE’s ranks; hiring up to that level could take years.
In the meantime, immigration experts predict that the administration will increasingly lean on private contractors — especially when immigrants are detained after their arrest.
“States are falling over themselves to try to get their hands on some of this money.”
State and local governments, along with private prison companies, will almost certainly be tapped to provide detention beds for ICE. Bier noted that a drop in state prison populations over the last decade effectively means there is more space for immigration detention.
There could be bottlenecks there too, however, since some facilities will have to be brought back into operation over a period of months. State prisons and local jails are already facing record-high vacancies for guard positions.
“States are falling over themselves to try to get their hands on some of this money,” Bier said. “That will be the bulk of it. I think they do want to give these private prison contractors their due as well. A lot of them have already been gearing up to expand their operations as well in the longer term to get permanent facilities online. That is going to take some more time to construct.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
