Trump Budget Bill Will Turbocharge Authoritarian Deportation Regime
Co-Authored by Jezzie, Day, and Eds
Every day there are new outrages of ICE agents randomly snatching people, sometimes violently - off the streets, in their workplace, from their cars, at the immigration office, and in courthouses. The people taken are friends and neighbors. Marcelo, an 18-year-old in the U.S. since age 6, from Milford, MA, was a “collateral” arrest while ICE was looking for his father. Carol, a beloved waitress, homeowner and mother of three in deep red Kennett, MO was detained for a month away from her family and community. They both still face deportation orders.
In response to these and similar attacks all over the country, local communities are outraged and have organized in protest. But the hits keep on coming. United States Marines were deployed in Los Angeles against U.S. citizens to quell protests about immigration raids, and the Trump administration nationalized National Guard units over the objections of California’s governor. Despite vocal resistance throughout the country, the merciless treatment of immigrants continues relentlessly, ripping families and communities apart, and foretells of a dangerous and unprecedented American militarized state.
If the Trump/Republican budget reconciliation bill passes in its present form [1], its funding allocations promise that this dystopian future will arrive expediently, and that arrests, disappearances, detentions, and deportations will be far more numerous and worse, way worse. For this onslaught is premised on meeting the wildly unrealistic, self-imposed “mandate” of Trump and Stephen Miller, the architect and main proponent of the deportation regime, to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day throughout the nation, an unimaginable increase of ICE arrests in the interior of the country [2].
The majority of those arrests would have to be of non-criminal immigrants, like Marcelo and Carol, who are workers and students already contributing to their communities, because there are simply not enough of the violent criminal immigrants Trump promised to deport during his presidential campaign.
Take it directly from Miller. In a June 3rd social media post, he said that the bill “will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States.” Instead of paying for health care, nutritional assistance, schools, housing and so much more for the people of the United States, the bill will have us pay not only billions for obscene tax cuts for the rich but also billions to jack up a domestic secret police force, prison system and deportation regime [3].
So what does this literal war chest of a budget allocation buy? New and expanded detention facilities. Battalions of new immigration enforcement agents. Oh, and a speed run to the end of American democracy. Let’s break it down.
The bill passed by the Republican House more than triples the ICE budget to run detention prisons from the present $3.4 billion to at least $11.25 billion per year for the next four years [4]. Further, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a separate division within Homeland Security, is seeing its own budget to construct and expand detention facilities skyrocket to $5 billion in the bill.
Often, these detention facilities (separated for families and single adults) are run by private prison companies which are notorious for harsh conditions and overcrowding [5]. While ICE’s current detention capacity is 41,000, there are currently nearly 49,000 immigrants imprisoned. With the new funding, the capacity will increase to about 100,000, and the CBP’s will likely grow to 36,000. Compounding the overcrowding conditions, and itself morally corrupt and indefensible, the bill eliminates the 20 day limit for children to be held in family centers, thus allowing innocent children to be incarcerated indefinitely.
The pressure on ICE to arrest 3,000 immigrants per day, whatever their legal status, will be intense. At present, 43% of those detained nationally have no criminal record or pending criminal charges [6]. Similarly, 46% of those arrested in Massachusetts in May 2025 had no criminal convictions or pending charges. And many of those crimes were neither violent nor threats to public safety [7]. These data, from ICE records, speak to the growing anger of the populace in communities throughout the country seeing hard-working immigrants and children unfairly ripped away from their families and their communities. And it highlights the compelling argument that this massive increase in the reconciliation bill for immigration enforcement is not only unnecessary but also dangerous.
To accomplish that 3,000 per day quota, the budget bill provides ICE with enough funding to add 10,000 more agents and support staff over 5 years, an increase of nearly 50% of the entire agency personnel. Further, the bill increases the number of Border Patrol agents, who are also responsible for arrests and detentions, by 3,000 over the five year period. And as we have already seen, ICE can “borrow” law enforcement agents from the FBI, Secret Service, ATF, DEA and other agencies, not to mention the horrifying prospect of continuing to use the U.S. military for immigration enforcement purposes. Further, the reconciliation bill stretches the reach of the growing federal police state apparatus by allocating nearly $2 billion for DHS to “recruit” local law enforcement and to pay state and local governments to cooperate with enforcement activities, further increasing arrests and the risk of deportation for those immigrants with non-criminal or minor offenses.
But while the Trump administration is committed to increasing arrests, it has a lukewarm commitment to due process, with the budget bill allocating only a 30% increase in funding for immigration judges, nowhere near enough to manage a purported 627% increase in ICE arrests, per the Department of Homeland Security’s own braggadocious calculations. And so what is likely to happen to the huge increase of people being arrested but without a commensurate increase in detention facilities or immigration judges?
It has already started, with the precipitous removal without due process for hundreds of immigrant men, many innocent, to a prison in El Salvador. In this cruel deportation “plan” of the Trump administration, too many arrested immigrants will not get their day in court at all. The proposed bill eviscerates legal due process by exponentially increasing funding for “expedited removals”; a process that the Trump Administration has abused to remove immigrants without a judicial hearing, including even long-term residents [8], who are unable to prove they have lived in the US for at least two years. In the Trump cruelty regime, countless immigrants will either face languishing in harsh, overcrowded prisons or be subject to fast-track unconstitutional deportations.
This budget bill is the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda and is thus receiving considerable political and media attention. While much of the discussion of the bill has centered around severe service cuts to Medicaid, the ACA and SNAP funding, we must publicize the horrifying implications the Trump/Stephen Miller deportation regime has for immigrants and our democracy as whole. If there is to be a descent into full-blown authoritarianism in this country, it will be greased on the skids of this Republican bill that gives Trump full rein to arrest, detain and deport anyone under the guise of an immigration violation, even children born on U.S. soil. We will see hundreds of thousands more Marcelos and Carols before this is all over; our friends and neighbors, and people deeply-rooted in our communities, who suddenly disappear overnight.
The awareness is starting to break through in the media that, first, the budget reconciliation bill contains these massive spending increases for ICE and detention/deportation, and second, that it will invariably lead to greater authoritarianism. The New York Times calls the bill’s massive investment in federal immigration enforcement “a Trojan horse for an assault on the civil rights of all Americans,“ and that, “more citizens could get caught in the dragnet of detentions and deportations.”
The good news is that American people have registered their overwhelming disapproval of at least one element of the bill’s deportation regime: in a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 61% were against the $45 billion increase for more detention centers, as opposed to 24% in favor. Even Republicans are split on that question 50-50.
The bad news remains that time is short, and the bill can be passed solely with Republican votes in both the House and the Senate. Our strategy must be two-pronged: put public pressure on the Congress to reject the entire bill or, if not, to eliminate the immigration enforcement portions of the bill. And in order to activate public pressure, we need to raise public awareness of ICE increases, building on the growing unpopularity of ICE arrests in cities and towns throughout the country.
In a moment of rare lucidity, Donald Trump recently had it right when he referred to immigrants working on farms and in agricultural and hospitality industries as “very good, long time workers” before he retreated back to the Stephen Miller edict of cruel and uncompromising mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants, regardless of legal status or residential longevity. The vast number of American people believe that as well, for all non-criminal immigrants, for DACA youth and for children and families that are integrally woven into the fabric of our communities.
Original Art by Mike B
Here are some action steps we suggest you can take:
Urge the senators of your state to, first, file an amendment to strip from the bill all sections related to increased spending for immigration enforcement, and second, to vote against the entire budget reconciliation bill. You can contact them directly or use this online communication form put together by the National Immigration Law Center: https://act.nilc.org/page/79423/action/1?ea.tracking.id=web
Call your senators and urge them to protest the bill by using procedural methods to slow down the process of voting on the bill. This will give more time for the unpopularity of many elements of the bill to register with Republican senators and sway them to vote against it.
Ask them to deny all calls for unanimous consent.
Ask them to add as many amendments as possible during the vote-arama process.
Ask them to call for the removal of all non-budgetary items under the Byrd rule.
Urge friends and family in states other than Massachusetts that have Republican senators and representatives to express their opposition to the bill and specifically the immigration enforcement sections.
Inform our communities about the impact of the ICE funding increases by
Using social media to reach out to your networks, and
Expressing your concerns to local and national media (e.g., letters to the editor) and political influencers, urging them to publicize the issue with their readers and followers. The more they hear from all of us, the more likely they will amplify the message to cut the bill’s huge increase in immigration enforcement and stop the Trump deportation regime.
NOTES
[1] This bill is also called, officially and popularly, the “One, Big Beautiful Bill.” In this article, we refer to it as the reconciliation budget bill, endorsed by the president, that was constructed to require only 50% of the vote in the Senate, thereby needing only Republican support for passage.
[2] “Interior” arrests are conducted by ICE throughout the country, usually of immigrants who have already established roots in and are contributing to their communities, as opposed to “border” arrests done by Border Patrol agents of immigrants just arriving.
[3] The Cato Institute estimates that by 2028, $80 billion will be spent on immigration enforcement, 80% of all federal law enforcement spending.
[4] That amount would be nearly 50% higher than the annual cost of the entire federal prison system.
[5] The bill allows for DHS to overrule any federal, state or local health and safety standards that would otherwise govern conditions in these prisons.
[6] Among the 43% are those who have broken U.S. immigration laws, such as visa overstays (which is only a civil violation and not a crime) (https://www.ice.gov/statistics).
[7] See also: Dan Glaun and Yoohyun Jung, “How ICE arrest quotas are driving raids in Massachusetts communities,” Boston Globe, June 18, 2025; and https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/10/metro/ice-arrests-interior-enforcement-quota-massachusetts/
[8] Currently, expedited removals are legal for those immigrants who are undocumented and cannot prove they have been in the country for at least two years.
SOURCES
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text
https://immigrationimpact.com/2025/05/05/house-reconciliation-bill/
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/3/silky_shah
https://tracreports.org/immigration/detentionstats/pop_agen_table.html
https://x.com/StephenM/status/1930035638562095386
Dan Glaun and Yoohyun Jung, “How ICE arrest quotas are driving raids in Massachusetts communities,” Boston Globe, June 18, 2025: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/10/metro/ice-arrests-interior-enforcement-quota-massachusetts/
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/02/26/under-president-trump-ice-arrests-have-increased-627
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/17/budget-bill-poll/
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