Congress Gives ICE More Money Than It Could Have Ever Imagined
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.