The basic structure of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was this: savage cuts to social benefits of all kinds, including Medicaid, food stamps, and (implicitly) Obamacare, coupled to massive tax cuts for the rich, and a stupendous increase in funding for mass deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) together got a whopping $170 billion—making it better funded than any military outside of China, Russia, and the U.S. itself—with little if any controls or oversight on how the money was spent.
The supposed point of this was to pre-fund the deportation surge through Trump’s entire term, in case Democrats won the midterms. That funding is available through 2028 at least. In response, and in protest over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats shut down the base Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget and refused to fund ICE and CBP any further. The thinking was that these agencies could use their surge money for normal operations until they got back toward a normal budget outlay.
Republicans then did another end run, with a reconciliation bill that added $70 billion in base ICE and CBP funding for three years. This comes to a total of $240 billion—almost a quarter-trillion dollars—for these two relatively minor agencies.
Unbelievably, it turns out that House Republicans are working on a DHS appropriations bill for the next fiscal year that would increase ICE/CBP funding even more, by another $28.4 billion. This represents a bulked-up appropriation for these agencies, even though that was just passed in the second reconciliation package. They are apparently pretending the whole double pre-funding thing didn’t happen. The number, when it comes to mass deportation at least, can only go up.
And yet few Democrats are making a stink about this endless ratcheting up of funding for Trump’s mass deportation machine. The ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security is once again Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), back after Trump pardoned him out of his Biden-era corruption indictment. Little can be expected from that quarter. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking member of the overall Appropriations Committee, at least put out a statement condemning the reconciliation bill. “I am leading the way to implement major reforms that will transform these agencies which currently operate like an unaccountable paramilitary force,” it said. But it’s fair to say there has not been a coordinated Democratic effort to point out that this tripling down for deportation funding is happening.
It’s worth taking a moment to process the stupendous ramp-up in deportation spending over the last quarter-century, and particularly the last two years. In 2024, total congressional appropriations for ICE and CBP were a comparatively modest $17.4 billion. If you average the reconciliation packages over the last two years, funding is now something like $120 billion per year—a roughly 700 percent increase (though it’s unclear how much of the last bill’s funding is remaining).
But even those 2024 figures were a major increase compared to prior years. ICE got just $3.4 billion from Congress in 2004, its first full year of operation. CBP’s budget, including both appropriations and fee-funded programs, increased by 189 percent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2003 and 2024.
Today, the amount of money being spent on these two agencies boggles the mind. Two hundred and forty billion dollars could fund the Environmental Protection Agency for about 26 years. It could fund Medicare—that is, health insurance for the statistically sickest cohort of people in the country—for about three months. It is about $700 from every man, woman, and child in the country. And in the GOP’s conception, that’s on top of their normal, also excessive appropriation.
It’s important to emphasize that this funding has little to do with immigration law per se. If Republicans cared about that, they would fund immigration courts as much as they fund law enforcement, and thereby relieve the stupendous and rapidly growing backlog of immigration cases. They do not. Instead, the money is almost all going to hire kidnappers by the tens of thousands, who, when they aren’t shooting defenseless U.S. citizens in the head, snatch people off the street and stuff them into newly built concentration camps. These camps have intentionally horrendous conditions so as to coerce detainees into signing self-deportation papers without getting their day in court.
Dozens of people have died in these filthy, disease-ridden camps, where inmates attest the food is inadequate and rotten. Some 500 toddlers and infants have been detained in them as well, as MS NOW and the Marshall Project recently reported. As The Washington Post also recently uncovered, ICE storm troopers recently snatched a three-year-old U.S. citizen from his immigrant mother—refusing to allow her to take him along—and instead gave him to his aunt’s estranged ex-husband, who tortured the boy to death over several weeks. Then ICE officials lied that she was to blame.
The only potential silver lining here, if we can call it that, is that an enormous share of the ICE/CBP spending is quickly disappearing into a sucking abyss of MAGA corruption. Public Citizen details one telling instance in which a contractor tasked with building a detainment facility literally on the site of a former World War II Japanese internment camp did such an atrocious job that it had to be kicked off the project and replaced with another contractor, which of course had a mile-long rap sheet of legal violations. With little oversight, the president committing unprecedented acts of corruption on a daily basis, and the government trough overflowing with mass deportation money, the MAGA hogs are stuffing themselves silly with taxpayer cash.
But waste and corruption are ICE and CBP’s problem. That does not justify granting three different annual appropriations, effectively, for the same two agencies.
And this is predictably crowding out the kind of social spending Republicans can’t stand. Another section of the GOP budget bill under consideration proposes slashing funding for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program by as much as 75 percent. Eligible breastfeeding women would see their already paltry $52 per month in healthy food benefits cut to $13; young children would see theirs cut from $26 to $10. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) recently promised that further massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are coming.
This is what Republicans do. They take money, food, and health insurance from the most vulnerable people in society, particularly single mothers and their children, and divert the resources to rich people, the bloated salaries of tens of thousands of MAGA storm troopers, pointless wars of aggression in the Middle East, and corrupt contracts for their cronies. Those contracts in turn are to commit heinous abuse of as many minorities as can be readily obtained.
I think one reason Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet is that during the 2024 election, swing voters either did not hear about his openly announced plan to commit war crimes against American cities, funded by more than a trillion dollars in cuts to food and health insurance programs, or did not believe it if they did. The fact that he’s going through with it has left a lot of the country, including much of the political media and the Democratic Party, stunned into disbelief. It’s long since time to face reality and make it clear that these are the stakes.
