Qian Weizhong/VCG via AP
Asylum seekers are processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, June 8, 2024, in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.
Congressional Republicans are in a panicked sprint trying to put together a reconciliation package for this year. That’s their one chance to make an end run around the Senate filibuster, and so the entire Trump agenda is being stuffed into it. (Here at the Prospect, we’ve got further coverage on education policy and the bill’s general chances of success.)
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee is marking up its part of the bill. The text is out, and it is a doozy. It would greatly increase the funding for Trump’s mass deportation machine by forcing immigrants themselves to pay tons of fines, and it would abolish the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust powers.
The most outrageous section is certainly the proposal to slap huge new fees on various types of immigrants. For instance, if this passes, anyone who applies for asylum will have to cough up $1,000, while applying for Temporary Protected Status will cost $500. Parolees (people allowed to enter the country while their case is being processed) will be charged $1,000. Sponsors of unaccompanied children will have to pay $3,500, and any parolee or person with TPS status will have to pay $550 to apply for a work permit. Many more fees are applied to about every process throughout the immigration system.
All the money will go to fund immigration enforcement; all the fines can be adjusted upward by the homeland security secretary. They will be adjusted for inflation going forward, but cannot be waived. The purpose, obviously, is to coerce people away from trying to immigrate to America, inflict pain on the ones that remain, and use the money to fund even more anti-immigrant attacks—like this recent story from Oklahoma, where ICE broke into the home of U.S. citizens looking for someone who didn’t live there, forced their underage daughters to stand outside in the rain in their underwear, ripped the house apart, and stole all their computers and money as “evidence.”
The asylum application fee in particular is a first in U.S. history. In addition to the flagrant injustice of charging people who are basically by definition at the end of their financial rope, it would seem to violate the international treaty on refugees. That states: “The Contracting States shall not impose upon refugees duties, charges or taxes, of any description whatsoever, other or higher than those which are or may be levied on their nationals in similar situations.” (The U.S. didn’t sign that original treaty, but it did sign the 1967 amendment, which expanded its scope.)
A more subtle but also outrageous section of the Judiciary bill would transfer “all FTC antitrust actions, all FTC antitrust employees, all FTC antitrust assets, and all FTC antitrust funding to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.”
The asylum application fee in particular is a first in U.S. history and would seem to violate the international treaty on refugees.
On first blush, this doesn’t sound so bad—consolidating antitrust powers in one agency rather than two might seem like logical bureaucratic housecleaning. But as this Government Accountability Office report outlines, the FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division have different areas of responsibility, as outlined by statute, and they have worked quite well together for over a century. There isn’t much conflict, and when there is, there is a special procedure to figure out who does what.
Importantly, that means the agencies can’t just be mashed together under DOJ without revising several other statutes—which this bill does not do—because they have different powers. For instance, the FTC can’t file a criminal case, but the DOJ does not have the FTC’s civil and rulemaking authorities outlined in the FTC Act, first passed in 1914. That law empowers the agency to prevent unfair competition and deceptive business practices through both penalties and rules, and to produce various reports and data for the public.
As former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya points out on Twitter/X, the FTC is currently in the process of completing a study showing that pharmacy benefit managers “mark up cancer drugs by up to 4000%,” as well as suing them for allegedly conspiring to fix insulin prices. If the agency is abolished, both of those things will likely go in the garbage, because they were brought under the FTC’s Section 5 “unfair methods of competition” authority, which the Justice Department does not have.
In other words, this is a backdoor way to cancel Section 5. As for the FTC’s antitrust lawsuits already in progress, it would be up to Attorney General Pam Bondi—not the head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Gail Slater—to decide whether to move forward with them. That includes a case in the liability phase of a trial right now against Meta, along with several others.
Of course, gutting the antitrust power of the FTC is almost certainly the point. Steve Bannon of all people points out that House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) has long been in bed with Big Tech, and gutting the FTC would also probably end that lawsuit against Meta, which has thus far gone extremely well for the government. As my colleague David Dayen reports, Mark Zuckerberg’s private communications revealed in court show him saying openly and repeatedly that he bought competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp to prevent competition.
It’s somewhat mysterious to me why MAGA leaders loathe Meta so much, as Facebook is one of the greatest engines of right-wing extremism ever created, and Zuckerberg has bent over backwards to appease conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular. But this fight between MAGA and the somewhat more traditional Republicans—that is, boringly rather than insanely corrupt—like Jordan may determine whether the FTC, and its highly overdue action to enforce antitrust law in the social media industry, will survive.
Finally, the bill would change the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to nullify agency rules after the fact. Under this bill, Congress would have to approve every agency rule before it goes into effect; given that Congress can barely accomplish must-pass tasks like funding the government, this would make new rules all but impossible. It also says that Congress would have to affirmatively approve existing rules for them not to expire. It is a massive bit of stealth deregulation tucked into the bill.
But I guess letting people die from workplace accidents, breathing foul air, or whatever other horror corporate America conjures up is the price we have to pay for free enterprise in full bloom.
Editor’s note: After the publication of this article, Reuters reported that Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee abandoned their plan to move the FTC's antitrust authorities to the Department of Justice.
