Supplemental funds: ICE doesn't need another $100 billion

Patricia Lopez, Tribune News Service

One of the biggest spending items in the Republican budget bill has hardly gotten any attention: $170 billion for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration. By some calculations, it would make the annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement larger than Israel’s entire defense budget. The supplemental funds — to be spent over the next four years — would leave vital aspects of immigration reform unaddressed. But the funding is essential to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans. Vice President JD Vance left little doubt of that when he posted on social media, “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.”

Yet according to Priorities USA, a progressive group that conducted polling on the bill in June, less than 2% of voters had heard of the tax bill’s immigration provisions. The reality is that most Americans reject the harshness of mass deportations and support green cards and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who can meet the requirements. Trump has already succeeded in essentially sealing the border, with the lowest crossing levels in years. Nevertheless, this new round of funding would see the total budget for ICE skyrocket. Its current budget is about $10 billion a year; the tax bill would give it another $100 billion to spend by 2029. For comparison, the current annual budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is just one part, is about $108 billion a year.

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the conservative Cato Institute, told me, “It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of spending this bill would yield.” DHS, he said, would become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, with a budget and staffing that would dwarf those of the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. ICE’s force of 6,000 agents would mushroom to 16,000. The amounts, Bier said, “are so astronomical that they are going to be shoveling money out the door with very little oversight or checks on how it is to be spent. It’s as good as a blank check.”

ICE, with a previous budget of $3.43 billion for detention operations in 2024, would get $45 billion to create a 100,000-bed daily capacity. One potential model was just unveiled in Florida: the instantly notorious “Alligator Alcatraz.” The 5,000-bed tent camp, deep in the Everglades, was slapped together in just eight days.

Extra beds are a must if the administration is to hit its goals of 1 million deportations a year and 3,000 arrests per day. But when Trump says, as he did during his visit to the tent prison, that those beds would be filled with the “worst of the worst,” the reality is that many will be farm hands, day laborers, construction workers, hotel maids and others who take the lowest-paying jobs in this economy. ICE agents have already become less particular about targets and rougher in their tactics. In June, most arrestees had no criminal records, their chief offense being crossing illegally. Then consider who will be at least nominally in charge of this potentially gargantuan scale-up: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose previous job as South Dakota governor had her administering a budget of about $7 billion. Her track record does not inspire confidence. In June, ProPublica reported that as governor in 2023, Noem secretly accepted an $80,000 cut of the money she raised for a dark money group that promoted her political career and later failed to disclose it in federal filings.

Every sign here points to disaster — and the makings of a police state. Whenever this country has done large-scale roundups of immigrants for removal, those here legally, including US citizens, can find themselves ensnared and must rely on due process to extricate themselves. Earlier this month Heidi Plummer, an attorney in Orange County, California, was strolling through a park when she happened upon a raid in progress. ICE agents arrested her along with others and she was briefly detained until she could prove her identity. “I’ve been going to Centennial Park my entire life,” she said at the time. “I was in utter shock and disbelief that this could happen to any US citizen.”

Job Garcia, a US citizen and delivery driver, was tackled and thrown to the ground this month during a raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles by ICE agents and held for 24 hours, sustaining some injuries. Agents later claimed he attempted to interfere with their operations, which he denies.

A Government Accountability Office report found that between 2015 and 2020, ICE arrested 674 US citizens and detained 121. Now imagine an ICE force on steroids with quotas to meet. Meanwhile, the real work of comprehensive immigration reform, so desperately needed, will once again go undone despite this historic level of funding.

The asylum system needs overhauling, along with the immigration court system. So do the quotas that cap the number of immigrants that can come from each country. The reality is that the US has both a labor shortage and an aging workforce. We must also shorten the amount of time it takes to become a citizen; perhaps if it didn’t take a decade, immigrants would be less tempted to cross illegally.