Aside from cuts to Medicaid and the disastrous ways in which the medical system at large will be affected, another big aspect of President Trump and the Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, that has rightly received a lot of attention is its wildly increased funding for and empowerment of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — better known as ICE.
Once again, we asked David Dayen, Executive Editor for The American Prospect, to give us a breakdown of how the bill plays into this administration’s incredibly aggressive anti-immigration and mass deportation efforts.
“This bill adds $170 billion for immigration enforcement and immigration operations, generally,” Dayen started off. “A lot of that goes to building the border wall and the various security measures at the border, but there is a $30 billion increase in the ICE budget, which is about triple their annual budget, and there’s another $45 billion for the building of detention centers.”
It is estimated that before the bill ICE detention facilities had a combined capacity of over 50,000 beds, but with this increased funding that number is expected to increase well beyond 100,000.
Dayen took a moment to note that, in his home city of Los Angeles, ICE raids and kidnappings have been happening at alarming rates over the last month, and now that they have been given unprecedented power by this bill, that activity is only going to increase and become more widespread.
“They’re coming to a city near you,” he warned, with not a hint of irony. “The Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have much more ability to do on-going raids all over the country; they become, in this bill, the largest law enforcement operation in American history.”
To put that into perspective on a larger scale, it has been reported that this new expanded budget for ICE ranks them just under Canada’s entire defense budget, and above the defense budgets of Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, and others.
“[ICE is] going to have much more capacity to engage in these reigns of terror that we’ve seen all over the country— arresting, kidnapping people essentially, putting them in unmarked vehicles, not necessarily based on their citizenship but based on some form of racial profiling, essentially; and taking these people, detaining these people, and shipping them out of the country— to any third country that they choose, now that the Supreme Court has blessed that.”
Dayen’s remark about the Supreme Court refers to an order that the SCOTUS issued at the end of June which effectively stopped a federal judge’s attempt to block Trump’s ability to simply send deportees wherever he wanted with no consideration for the potential dangers this could present if a deportee is sent to a hostile location.
“It’s a real problem,” said Dayen. “And we’re going to see this really aggressive, punitive, and terrorizing immigration enforcement that we’ve seen in smaller quantities before but we’re going to see in much larger quantities now.”
Watch our full discussion with David Dayen on ICE’s expanded funding: