AMERIKA SUPERFUNDS GESTAPO

The ‘big beautiful bill’ will supercharge Trump’s immigration crackdown. 

Here’s how, in 6 charts.

Mike Bebernes,  Reporter

Updated Thu, July 3, 2025


An ICE Special Response Team member stands guard outside a detention center in downtown Los Angeles. (Eric Thayer/AP)

Republicans have handed President Trump an enormous injection of money to fund 

his hard-line immigration agenda. The “big beautiful bill,” which cleared its final

 legislative hurdle on Thursday, includes roughly $170 billion in additional funding

 to supercharge Trump’s mass deportation efforts and ramp up border security.

Though there are still heated disagreements and fights within the GOP over what should go in the final package, none of those debates centered around immigration funding, which was virtually unchanged between the Senate and House versions of the bill. The mega-bill will empower the Trump administration to build new immigration detention facilities, hire thousands more immigration officers, construct new sections of Trump’s long-promised border wall and pour billions of dollars into other aspects of immigration enforcement.

Here are the details of what the bill will mean for the American immigration system.

Border wall

One of the signature promises of Trump’s first presidential term was his pledge to build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall” across the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Legal challenges, logistical snags and funding shortfalls prevented him from delivering on that promise. During his first term, his administration replaced more than 400 miles worth of existing barriers, but only built 47 miles of new wall where none had existed before — at an estimated cost of $15 billion.

The new bill provides more than three times that amount for an “integrated border barrier system” that includes a plan to build 700 miles of new walls, 900 miles of barriers along the Rio Grande River, more than 600 miles of secondary barriers and an array of “cutting-edge technologies” to bolster the physical barriers, according to estimates from the GOP-led House Committee on Homeland Security.

Immigration detention

Since returning to the White House, Trump has mounted an unprecedented and deeply controversial campaign to sweep up and deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. So far, though, the scope of his ambitions has outstretched the logistical capacity of the agencies tasked with carrying out those orders, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

ICE is on pace this year to more than double the number of arrests that it made in 2024, but is still trending well short of the targets his administration has set. Deportations are up, too, but only slightly above where they were during former President Joe Biden’s last year in office.

One of the biggest bottlenecks slowing ICE’s deportation progress is a lack of space to house all of the people they want to detain. Officially, ICE has enough money for 41,000 beds in detention centers across the country, but the agency reported it was detaining more than 59,000 people as of late last month.

The bill includes $45 billion to dramatically increase ICE’s detention capacity. According to estimates by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the agency’s current $3.4 billion detention budget would more than double next year and gradually increase until it reaches nearly $15 billion by 2029.

The bill doesn’t call for ICE to build a specific number of beds, but Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has said the agency will need a minimum of 100,000 beds to carry out its mass deportation plans. Some experts believe the true total could ultimately prove to be as high as 200,000.

With this huge influx of funding, immigration detention could eventually rival the federal prison system, both in terms of capacity and funding. There are currently more than 155,000 people being held in federal prisons nationwide, well above ICE’s stated goal but below where some estimates fall. Thanks to a modest funding boost in the bill, the Bureau of Prisons would have an average annual budget of about $9.5 billion over the next ten years. That will be roughly equivalent to ICE’s average yearly detention funding of $9.7 billion, but dwarfed by the $14.9 billion the CBO anticipates ICE to receive in 2029.

More enforcement, more hurdles

On top of the extra funding for the wall and detention facilities, the bill will also give ICE an additional $31 billion, with the bulk of that money intended to help the agency hire new enforcement officers. Right now, the agency has 6,000 people on staff dedicated to its Enforcement and Removal Operations. The bill will give ICE the resources to hire 10,000 more. Another $12 billion in the bill will go to U.S. Customs and Border Protection to hire 5,000 new customs officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.

The bill allocates $12.5 billion to support immigration enforcement efforts by state and local authorities. It will also provide $6.2 billion for border screening and surveillance technology, “including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies.”

AOC Warns of ICE ‘Explosion’ After ‘Big Beautiful’ Bill Passes

Emell Derra Adolphus
Fri, July 4, 2025 
DAILY BEAST


Jeenah Moon / Reuters


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that the effects of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will quickly turn ugly.

On the heels of the budget plan skating through the House of Representatives, AOC took to Bluesky to sound the alarm that the worst is yet to come.

“I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE,” she wrote on Thursday after the bill passed the House. “This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.”

The legislation, which now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk for signature, allots $170 billion to support the administration’s immigration crackdown—which includes $45 billion for detention centers, $30 billion for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and just under $50 billion will go to build a wall at the southern border.

“It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play,” AOC added. “And people are disappearing.”

On top of this, the budget is expected to add $3.4 trillion to the national debt of $36.2 trillion, drawing criticism from several Republicans and Democrats in the lead-up to its passage.

Trump was in a jubilant mood in Des Moines, Iowa. / Scott Olson/Getty Images

Trump has championed the bill as the “biggest tax cuts in our country’s history” and dismissed any notion that the package was unpopular among Americans at an Iowa rally on Thursday.

He claimed that the only poll he had seen unfavorable of the package was a “Democratic” poll.

At his rally, he touted, “No death tax, no estate tax, no going through the banks and borrowing from—in some cases, a fine banker—and in some cases, shylocks and bad people,” using an antisemitic slur.

However, CNN reported polls from the Washington Post, Pew Research Center, Fox News, Quinnipiac University, and the Kaiser Family Foundation showing that the spending package had notched negative approval ratings at -19, -20, -21, -26, and -29 percent, respectively.

Congress Throws More Money at Removing Immigrants than Most Countries Spend on Their Armies

The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.

Josh Kovensky
Fri, July 4, 2025

TPM

It’s hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country’s immigration enforcement infrastructure.

The Bureau of Prisons? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The Marine Corps? Bigger even than that, by some estimates.

All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council and TPM’s own read of the legislation. ICE, responsible for enforcement, detentions, and removals, will oversee much of the spending.

The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.

“It’s going to get really scary,” Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, told TPM. “I do think that we are in a place where the Trump administration is centering a lot of the law enforcement authority of the federal government into the Department of Homeland Security.”

Take this example of how the legislation ranks which parts of the immigration system are important.

The bill gives ICE $29.8 billion to hire new staff and conduct deportations. That will lead to a hiring spurt of deportation officers; an additional $4.1 billion bump goes to Customs and Border Protection for new personnel.

For immigration detention, also overseen by ICE, the bill allocates a whopping $45 billion.

If that’s not enough, there’s more: Remember the wall? It was Trump’s big immigration-related promise during the 2016 campaign. It didn’t get built during his first term (and Mexico never paid for it, as Trump promised). Congress allocated $46.5 billion for its construction in this legislation. (A Senate source tells TPM that this, to, was drafted in such a way as to be fungible, so it could be used for building detention facilities as well.)

It’s a headspinning increase from ICE’s 2024 funding, that, per a recent CRS report, stood at $9.9 billion.

At the same time, the bill adds only a modest number of immigration judges, capping the number at 800 starting in November 2028 — an increase from the current approximately 700.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, cast the funding surge last week in the administration’s favored light: a means of evicting criminal aliens from the country. The operation that the numbers envision goes far beyond that; Homan complained that, at current funding levels, the country only has between five and six thousand deportation officers.

“More agents means more bad guys arrested, taken off the streets of this country every single day,” he said of the new funding. “Every day we arrest a public safety threat or national security threat, that makes this country much safer. Who the hell would be against that?”

To Homan, the Trump administration, and its allies in the right-wing media, every undocumented immigrant apprehended and removed is a criminal alien. It’s how they cast the Alien Enemies Act removals, even though a 60 Minutes analysis found that around three-quarters of those removed had no documented criminal background.

The point is mostly to justify the massive scale of the resources now being marshaled to detain and eject immigrants. This is all new money to be added on top of that which Congress has already marked for immigration enforcement. Under this legislation, ICE will receive a budget for detention alone that’s more than two-thirds larger than that of the federal prison system. The bill also makes a $10 billion slush fund available to the Secretary of Homeland Security, currently Kristi Noem, for reimbursing “costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.”

Absent the constant claim, expressed by Homan and others, that undocumented immigrants present a criminal threat beyond the administrative violation of crossing the border, there’s little argument for this level of spending.

Orozco, the Immigration Council attorney, said that more than half of those currently in immigration detention had no criminal record.

“It’s a lie that they’re trying to use these resources just for folks with, with serious criminal histories,” he said.

For the past five months, immigration enforcement has been the focus of the Trump administration’s most egregious abuses of civil liberties. Removing people to El Salvador’s CECOT without a hearing; using the military to intimidate anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. It’s the tipping point of the spear for much of the current administration’s authoritarian impulses.

Because of this, that’s about to get a lot bigger.

Opinion

Congress Gives ICE More Money Than It Could Have Ever Imagined

Robert McCoy
Thu, July 3, 2025 

THE NEW REPUBLIC




Donald Trump’s budget bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature, will balloon immigration and border enforcement spending astonishingly—so much so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget will overshadow every single federal law enforcement agency, and U.S. spending on immigration enforcement will surpass all but 15 countries’ military budgets.

The bill allocates about $150 billion to immigration enforcement through 2029. ICE will receive $45 billion from that total sum, more funding than any other agency in the federal government, according to the American Immigration Council, or AIC.

According to AIC Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, each year, ICE will now be flushed with more cash than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, with the bill’s passage, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, ICE will become the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

Further, per a report from Newsweek, Trump’s immigration slush fund will be so expansive as to rival the resources of some of the world’s most well-financed militaries. If the money going to U.S. immigration enforcement each year on average for the next four years were the budget of a country’s military, the report found, that country would have the sixteenth best-funded military on the planet—just below Canada’s, and above Italy’s and Israel’s.

The far-right is already celebrating the bill’s immigration enforcement provisions, which right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk tweeted will give MAGA “a standing army.” Such gloating is, apparently, far less hyperbolic than it sounds. And with newfound billions at its disposal, this “standing army” will only wreak further havoc, and trammel further upon civil liberties, than it already has in communities nationwide.

Trump bill gives ICE $45 billion for detaining immigrants - more than it received in the last 15 years combined

Josh Marcus
Fri, July 4, 2025 

THE INDEPENDENT

The Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” domestic spending legislation, which passed Congress yesterday, will provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement about $45 billion over the next four years to spend on detaining undocumented immigrants, part of an unprecedented investment in enforcement set to turbo-charge the administration’s already sweeping campaign of arrests and deportations.

The funding is more than the federal government spent on immigration detention during the previous three presidential administrations, combined, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told Democracy Now! that the spending package, which contains about $170 billion in wider immigration and border funding, makes ICE “the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.”

“We’re talking nearly 20 years’ worth of detention funding to be spent only in a four-year period, and an increase to ICE’s enforcement budget beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, allowing the agency to expand mass deportations over the next four years to every community nationwide,” he said.

The White House has described the immigration funding as the linchpin of the Big, Beautiful Bill, more consequential even than its tax and Medicaid cuts, which are forecasted to add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade and cause 11.8 million more people to go without health coverage.

Trump administration’s Big, Beautiful Bill spending package devotes $45 billion to migrant detention, which federal officials say will fund an expansion of US detention centers to be able to hold up to 100,000 people

 (REUTERS)

“Everything else—the [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X of the bill earlier this week.

Federal officials plan to use the ICE windfall to roughly double the nation’s immigration detention capacity, bringing the total to between 80,000 and 100,000 detention beds.

If the administration’s current strategy holds, those beds will largely be filled by migrants who would’ve been considered low priorities in past administrations.

Among those arrested and deported under Trump so far, 61 percent had no previous criminal conviction, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Even without the historic expansion in funding, the nation’s detention system held a record number of migrants last month, over 56,000. The surge in detainees has prompted a worsening in conditions inside these facilities, according to critics.

At least 11 people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, a rate that means 2025 could be one of the worst years for migrant deaths in federal custody in decades.

In addition to funding more detention centers, the administration has taken other steps to expand its immigration and border apparatus, including transferring hundreds of miles of land on the US-Mexico border to federal control to create military exclusion zones, and fast-tracking construction of border barriers in the Rio Grande by waiving environmental laws.


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The administration also plans to help Florida fund a migrant detention center in the Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” Though Florida has yet to ask for money to help run the facility, according to court records.

A further expansion in the footprint of immigration enforcement and detention could set off domestic unrest.

ICE enforcement prompted widespread, sometimes violent, protests in Los Angeles that saw the White House send in federal troops in response, and Democratic lawmakers have been involved in a number of chaotic confrontations with law enforcement while conducting oversight visits at ICE detention facilities and immigration courts.

How $45 billion in ‘big, beautiful bill’ funding aids ICE detention

Jeff Arnold
Fri, July 4, 2025 

THE HILL



More than $45 billion in the “big, beautiful bill” that President Trump signed Friday is earmarked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention space, which officials say will add up tens of thousands of beds for migrants being held in federal custody.

An estimated $170 billion of the bill has been designated for immigration enforcement as the Trump administration has promised to orchestrate the largest mass deportation effort in American history. But the funding that has been devoted to ICE detention space in the final bill. passed by the House on Thursday, is more than the government spent on housing migrants during the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined, The Washington Post reported.

Federal officials estimate the $45 billion will provide an additional 100,000 beds in ICE facilities at a time when ICE has nearly 56,400 migrants in its detention centers nationwide as of mid-June, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The number of detainees increased by more than 5,000 during the first two weeks of June.

Data showed that of those detained, 28 percent have a prior criminal conviction, while 25 percent have pending criminal charges.

The funding bump in the bill was approved after Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Kristi Noem toured a new detention facility that administration officials have called “Alligator Alcatraz.” White House Border Czar Tom Homan told NewsNation’s “CUOMO” this week that the facility in the Florida Everglades will cost an estimated $450 million to operate each year.

But officials said the facility could be a blueprint for more ICE detention centers that the government plans to open now that funding has been approved.

President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and others, tour “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, Tuesday, July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

“Everybody we arrest, we need a bed, because they’re going to be in detention from several days to several months, depending on the case,” Homan said. “So, this will give us a little breathing room, give us extra beds so we can target more criminals throughout the country.”

The border czar had previously called on Congress to provide more funding for detention that would allow ICE to detain migrants taken into federal custody. In June, the agency published a list of more than 40 contractors that could assist with the “emergency acquisition” of space for migrant detainees, the Post reported.

In addition to the $45 billion set aside for ICE detention and agents, the funding bill that was approved by Congress this week allocates another $46 billion for continued construction of the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Where will additional ICE detention centers be located?

Real Clear Politics reported this week that the $45 billion that will be devoted to ICE represents a 265 percent increase in its current detention budget, which will be higher than that of the American prison system.

The current load of detainees is the highest since that data has been compiled by ICE since the first time Trump was in office. In addition to providing more beds, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement to the Post that the funding for ICE in the bill will allow the agency to hire an additional 10,000 federal agents.





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Officials announced earlier this year that the agency’s migrant detention centers were at capacity. The government contracts with private prison companies to operate detention facilities. The two main companies, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, have been awarded nine contracts by ICE for expanded detention, per the Post.

Contracts have also been awarded to companies to produce temporary tent structures, which would be used to house migrants, the report said. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) determined through a Freedom of Information Act request that private companies were looking to enter into government contracts in states like Michigan, California, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Washington state.

The Post’s report indicated that CoreCivic and the Geo Group already own prisons that are sitting empty in several states, including Kansas (Leavenworth), Colorado, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Oklahoma.

The ACLU also reported that in 2022, the GEO Group made $1.05 billion in revenue from ICE contracts alone, while CoreCivic made $552.2 million during the same year.

“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” said CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger during an earnings call in May with shareholders, according to The Associated Press.

The expansion of detention space comes at a time when more than a dozen people have died in ICE facilities since October, including 10 during 2025. In 2024, an ACLU report indicated that 95 percent of deaths that took place in ICE facilities between 2017 and 2021 could have been prevented or possibly prevented.

That investigation, which was conducted by the ACLU, American Oversight and Physicians for Human Rights, analyzed the deaths of the 52 people who died in ICE custody during that time frame.

'Making America militarized again': Use of military in U.S. erodes democracy, veteran advocates say

Zurie Pope
Thu, July 3, 2025

 Los Angeles Times

California National Guard members stand outside a federal building in Santa Ana on June 18. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Spouses experiencing health emergencies alone, because their loved ones are serving on the streets of Los Angeles. Troops fatigued by a mission they weren't prepared for. Children of active-duty troops left without their parents, who were deployed on U.S. soil.

Such incidents are happening because of the Trump administration's decision to send troops to Los Angeles, said Brandi Jones, organizing director for the Secure Families Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for military spouses, children and veterans.

"We've heard from families who have a concern that what their loved ones have sacrificed and served in protection of the Constitution, and all the rights it guarantees, are really under siege right now in a way they could never have expected," Jones said Thursday during a virtual news conference.

California National Guard troops stand outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles during a June 14 protest. (Zurie Pope / Los Angeles Times)

On the eve of Independence Day, veterans, legal scholars and advocates for active-duty troops warned that sending troops to quell protests in California's largest city threatens democratic norms. Under a 147-year-old law, federal troops are barred from being used for civilian law enforcement.

Dan Maurer, a retired lieutenant colonel who is now a law professor at Ohio Northern University, described this state of affairs during the news conference as "exactly the situation we fought for independence from," adding that President Trump is "making America militarized again."

Though 150 National Guard troops were released from protest duty on Tuesday, according to a news release from U.S Northern Command, around 3,950 remain in Los Angeles alongside 700 Marines, who are protecting federal property from protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions.

Read more: As Marines arrive in L.A., military experts raise concerns: 'This could spiral out of control'

Trump has defended the deployment of troops in Los Angeles, saying on his social media platform that the city "would be burning to the ground right now" if they were not sent. He has suggested doing the same in other U.S. cities, calling the L.A. deployment "the first, perhaps of many," during an Oval Office news conference.

Troops in L.A. were federalized under Title 10 of the United States code, and their purview is narrow. They do not have the authority to arrest, only to detain individuals before handing them over to police, and they are only obligated to protect federal property and personnel, according to the U.S Northern Command.

Though Marines detained a U.S. Army veteran in early June, the most active involvement they and the National Guard have had in ICE's activity is providing security during arrests, according to reports from Reuters and the CBS show "Face the Nation."

"The administration has unnecessarily and provocatively deployed the military in a way that reflects the very fears that our founding fathers had," Maurer said. "Using the military as a police force in all but name."

"The closer they [the military] act to providing security around a perimeter ... the closer they act to detaining individuals, the closer they act to questioning individuals that are suspected of being illegal immigrants, the closer the military is pushed to that Posse Comitatus line," Maurer said, referring to the law that prohibits use of troops in a law enforcement capacity on American soil. "That is a very dangerous place to be."

Other speakers argued that the use of troops in Los Angeles jeopardizes service members, placing them in a environment they were never trained for, and pitting them against American citizens.

Read more: National Guard arrives in Los Angeles as fallout from immigration raids continues

"Our Marines are our nation's shock troops, and it's entirely inappropriate that they're deployed in the streets of Los Angeles," said Joe Plenzler, a Marine combat veteran who served as platoon commander, weapons platoon commander and company executive officer for the 2nd Batallion 7th Marines, which is now deployed in downtown L.A.

Plenzler recalled that more than half of the men he served with in 2nd Batallion came from Spanish-speaking families, and some were in this country as legal permanent residents with green cards and had yet to enjoy all the benefits of citizenship.

Members of the California National Guard are deployed at a June 14 protest in downtown L.A. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

"Think about what might be going through their heads right now, as they're being ordered to help ICE arrest and deport hardworking people who look a lot like people they would see at their own family reunions," Plenzler said.

Plenzler also contrasted the training Marines receive with those of civilian law enforcement.

"We are not cops," Plenzler said. "Marines aren't trained in de-escalatory tactics required in community policing. We don't deploy troops in civilian settings, typically because it increases the risk of excessive force, wrongful deaths and erosion of public trust."

During the 1992 L.A. riots, Marines responded with the LAPD to a domestic dispute. One officer asked the Marines to cover him, and they, mistakenly believing he was asking them to open fire, fired 200 rounds into the home.

"Our troops are under-prepared, overstretched and overwhelmed," said Christopher Purdy, founder of the nonprofit veteran advocacy group The Chamberlain Network and a veteran of the Army National Guard.

Read more: Veterans' advocates warn of low morale amid L.A. deployment: 'This is not what we signed up for'

"Guard units doing these missions are often doing them with minimal preparation," Purdy said, stating that many units are given a single civil unrest training block a year.

"When I deployed to Iraq, we spent weeks of intense training on cultural competency, local laws and customs, how we should operate in a blend of civil and combat operations," Purdy said. "If we wouldn't accept that kind of shortcut for a combat deployment, why are we accepting it now when troops are being put out on the front line in American streets?"

Each speaker reflected on the importance of holding the federal government accountable, not only for its treatment of active-duty troops, but also for how these men and women are being used on American soil.

"I reflect this Fourth of July on both the promise and the responsibility of freedom. Military family readiness is force readiness," Jones said. "At Secure Families Initiative, we’re hearing from active-duty families: You can’t keep the force if families are stretched thin — or if troops are used against civilians."

Added Maurer: "The rule of law means absolutely nothing if those that we democratically entrust to enforce it faithfully ignore it at will. And I think that's where we are."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.