The War Economy at the Border

While Venezuela Reunites Families, the U.S. Builds a $131 Billion Border War Machine

In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed a budget that commits $131 billion to expanding detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is the largest immigration enforcement package in modern U.S. history and one that most people are funding without knowing. Public pension funds, university endowments, and municipal budgets are deeply invested in ICE’s machinery. If you pay into a retirement fund, attend a university, or live in a major city, your money might be helping detain someone. Your tax dollars already are.

The plan triples ICE’s funding, revives the failed border wall project, builds new jails for families, and allocates $10 billion in unregulated funds to the Department of Homeland Security. At the same time, up to 17 million people risk losing healthcare and millions of children face losing access to school meals.

These priorities are not accidental. They reflect a political strategy that treats migration as a threat to be neutralized rather than a consequence of U.S. policy. This budget doesn’t just expand infrastructure, it expands a racialized system of surveillance, incarceration and profit, while shrinking legal protection, due process, and public oversight.

Here’s what the new immigration budget includes:

$29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation – a threefold increase

$45 billion to build new immigration detention centers, including for children and families

$46.6 billion for border wall construction, which is more than triple what Trump spent in his first term

$10 billion in unregulated DHS funding to “safeguard the border” without oversight

A daily detention goal of 116,000 human beings, enough to fill a stadium with mothers, students, toddlers, and elders or to disappear the entire population of Lansing, Michigan or Athens, Georgia.

Limits the number of immigration judges to 800, worsening already record-breaking court backlogs and delaying due process for millions.

ICE is everywhere

ICE doesn’t operate alone. It dances with Palantir’s algorithms. It swallows data from school and DMV records. It whispers to local cops in sanctuary cities. It hides in contracts signed by universities that claim to care about inclusion. It is public and private, visible and invisible, and always expanding.

The border doesn’t stop at the border.

ICE shares tech, tactics, and training with local police across the U.S., especially in Black and Brown communities. The same algorithms used to deport migrants are used to lock up teenagers in Chicago, LA, and New York. The war economy is domestic, too.

Migration is not a crisis. U.S. policy is.

The people being detained and deported are not a crisis. They are the result of one. U.S. foreign policy, through sanctions, coups, climate extraction, and economic warfare, has destabilized entire regions and then criminalized those who flee.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Venezuela.

Years of U.S. sanctions have severely constrained Venezuela’s economy and pushed millions to migrate. A recent study in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral economic sanctions lead to an estimated 564,000 deaths every year, mostly among children under five. The researchers concluded that sanctions are a form of economic warfare with deadly consequences, often as destructive as armed conflict. Venezuela is among the countries most severely affected.

A stark contrast: Venezuela’s efforts to reunite families

Despite being locked out of international markets, denied access to its own reserves, and targeted by ongoing U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan government has prioritized reuniting families separated by deportation. Flights have been organized to return Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. and neighboring countries. Deportees are met with medical care, housing support, and assistance. There are no billion-dollar detention centers. No ankle monitors. No private contractors. Just the political decision to bring people home with dignity.

This reflects a deeper difference. The United States continues to expand a war economy, one that profits from incarceration, surveillance, and militarized borders. Corporations like Palantir, CoreCivic, and GEO Group are major beneficiaries of immigration funding, alongside weapons manufacturers and data firms. In contrast, Venezuela’s response, under siege, has been to build on a peace economy rooted in social programs, community organization, and everyday resilience.

Much of that work is led by women.

In Venezuela, Madres Víctimas del Fascismo have been organizing alongside the government to locate, support, and repatriate their children, many of whom were detained in the U.S. or in Latin American countries. These mothers have worked with consular authorities, spoken in public forums, and demanded state action to bring their families back together. Through their pressure, and the government’s cooperation, some have already seen their children return home.

This is what a peace economy looks like, one built on social programs, community organization, and state-supported reunification.

The violence of the border enforcement is the violence of the empire.

The United States fuels crises abroad, sanctions, coups, austerity, and then builds cages for those who flee. Venezuela knows this intimately. Its economy has been blocked, its institutions targeted, and its people criminalized the moment they cross a border. And yet it was Venezuela that welcomed deported migrants with food, medicine, and housing; they were greeted with care. A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.

Who Is Complicit?

This system doesn’t operate in just one region. It’s not limited to Texas or Arizona. It’s embedded across the country, in contracts, databases, and quiet forms of cooperation.

Schools often share data, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Universities collaborate with DHS through software licensing and research grants. Investors, including public pension funds and university endowments, hold shares in GEO Group, Palantir, and other deportation profiteers.

The U.S. has made its priorities clear. It is willing to spend more to detain migrants than to house the hundreds of thousands living unhoused on the streets of its cities. It is expanding detention while limiting legal avenues for relief. It is responding

to the consequences of its foreign policy with policing not accountability.

It’s not enough to say “Abolish ICE.” We must hold accountable every institution that feeds its machinery, from schools that share data, to universities that license surveillance tech, to investors profiting from migrant detention.

Migration is not a crime. U.S. sanctions are.

End institutional cooperation with ICE

Demand divestment from companies profiting off detention

Organize against U.S. sanctions and intervention

The war economy is everywhere. So the resistance must be, too.

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