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

It is difficult to transmit how the new budget makes of the country’s immigration application infrastructure.

The prison office? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The navy body? Bigger than that, by certain estimates.

Overall, the bill directs about $ 170 billion until 2029 to various forms of application of immigration, according to an analysis of the American immigration Council and the own reading of TPM legislation. Ice, responsible for the application, detention and moves, will supervise a large part of the expenses.

The image is not so much an expanded system of application of immigration, but of an entirely new system.

“It will become really frightening,” Adriel Orozco, principal lawyer for the American Immigration Council, told TPM. “I think we are in a place where the Trump administration centers a large part of the authority of the police of the federal government at the Ministry of Internal Security.”

Take this example of how legislation is classified in the parts of the immigration system.

The bill gives $ 29.8 billion on the ice to hire new employees and make deportations. This will lead to a job push of expulsion agents; An additional bump of $ 4.1 billion goes to customs and border protection for new staff.

For the holding of immigration, also supervised by ice, the bill attributes a huge $ 45 billion.

If that is not enough, there is more: do you remember the wall? It was the great promise linked to Trump’s immigration during the 2016 campaign. It was not built during his first mandate (and Mexico never paid him, as Trump promised). The congress allocated $ 46.5 billion for its construction in this legislation. (A source from the Senate said to TPM that this was written to be fungible, so it could be used to build detention facilities.)

It is an increase in the head of the ICE funding in 2024, which, according to a recent CRS report, amounted to $ 9.9 billion.

At the same time, the bill added only a modest number of immigration judges, capping the number to 800 from November 2028 – an increase compared to around 700.

Tom Homan, Trump’s tsar border, launched the financing thrust last week in the privileged light of the administration: a way to expel criminal foreigners from the country. The operation that the numbers envisaged go far beyond that; Homan complained that, at the current funding levels, the country has only five and six thousand deportation officers.

“More agents mean that more bad guys are arrested, have removed the streets of this country every day,” he said about new funding. “Every day, we stop a threat of public security or a national security threat, which makes this country much safer. Who would hear would be against that? “

For Homan, the Trump administration and its allies in the right -wing media, each undoubtedly undertaken and abolished immigrant is a criminal foreigner. This is how they threw up the moves of the Extraterrestrial Enemies Act, even if an analysis of 60 minutes revealed that around three -quarters of the deleted people had no documented criminal background.

The aim is mainly to justify the massive scale of resources which are now gathered to hold and eject immigrants. This is brand new money to add in addition to what Congress has already marked for the application of immigration. Under this legislation, Ice will receive a budget for alone which is more than two thirds larger than that of the federal penitentiary system. The bill also puts a Fondaire Snow fund of $ 10 billion at the disposal of the Homeland Security Secretary, currently Kristi Noem, for having reimbursed “the costs incurred to undertake activities in support of the Ministry of Internal Security to safeguard the borders of the United States”.

In the absence of the constant complaint, expressed by Homan and others, that undocumented immigrants have a criminal threat beyond the administrative violation of the crossing of the border, there are few arguments for this level of spending.

Orozco, the prosecutor of the Immigration Council, said that more than half of those who are currently in holding immigration had no criminal records.

“It is a lie that they are trying to use these resources only for people with, with serious criminal stories,” he said.

In the past five months, the application of immigration has been at the center of the most flagrant abuse of the Trump Administration of Civil Liberties. Remove people from El Salvador without audience; Use the army to intimidate the anti-ice demonstrations in Los Angeles. This is the tilting point of the lance for a large part of the authoritarian impulses of the current administration.

For this reason, it is about to become much larger.