With a cash infusion of around $150 billion toward immigration enforcement and border security in last week’s budget bill, congressional Republicans handed the Trump administration the resources needed to carry out its mass deportation policy. The intended result is as aggressive as it is likely transformative: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is slated to become the largest law enforcement agency in the country as dozens of new detention centers spring up to hold hundreds of thousands of immigrants awaiting expulsion.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is slated to become the largest law enforcement agency in the country
In the six months since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, there has been a surge in ICE raids, detentions and removals. The majority of targets in this increase are not the hardened criminals that MAGA supporters and administration officials claim. Shifts in policy have already stripped hundreds of thousands of immigrants of their legal protections to remain in the country. But the wide-ranging sweeps ICE has launched in churches, at farms and in Home Deport parking lots still haven’t resulted in enough arrests to satisfy White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has spent weeks insisting that more dedicated resources are needed to meet his goal of 3,000 arrests per day.
Republicans gave Miller the tools he wants when they passed their budget reconciliation bill Thursday. The two largest buckets of funding in the act provide $45 billion each toward building Trump’s border wall and vastly expanding America’s immigration detention capacity. By comparison, that’s more than 13 times the current annual ICE budget for detention ($3.4 billion) and more than five times the entire annual budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons ($8.6 billion).
An estimate from the American Immigration Council determines that if the money allocated is spread out to roughly $14 billion per year, then it would be enough for ICE to maintain around 116,000 beds. At present, the agency’s budget supports it holding about 41,000 detainees. Notably, though, those capacity figures assume that every detainee is granted a bed. There are reports of inhumane conditions in existing detention centers, where there were 56,000 immigrants in custody as of June 15. In other words, we could easily see the number of detainees more than double to fill the expanded capacity in hastily built detention centers.
Once this new funding hits ICE’s accounts, it will likely be spent as quickly as possible — with little oversight for how it’s doled out. The New York Times reported in April that ICE has already asked contractors for “proposals to provide new detention facilities, transportation, security guards, medical support and other administrative services worth as much as $45 billion over the next two years.” Much of that money will go toward private companies contracted to build and run these facilities, some of which have been major political backers for Trump and the GOP.
Beyond the funding for detention, there’s more money still. An analysis from the Washington Office on Latin America notes that ICE will also be getting $15 billion devoted toward physically removing migrants from the country. (Whether that is to their country of origin or some random third state is apparently a matter for the administration to decide, according to a recent Supreme Court decision.) Another $16.2 billion will be for the Department of Homeland Security to hire new ICE, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. About $8 billion of that will be for ICE to hire 8,500 new officers with another $860 million for paying recruitment and retention bonuses and $600 million for expanding the agency’s hiring capacity.
Already investors can see that the potential fiscal returns for exploiting human suffering are higher than they’ve been in over 150 years
Local and state officers are getting in on the gold rush, with $3.5 billion dedicated toward compensating states for detaining noncitizens and $10 billion to reimburse border states for hardening their borders. Given how eagerly sheriff’s offices and police departments compete for federal funding for other programs, it’s likely that many will leap at the chance to share in this bonanza.
Indeed, the keenest horror is that there’s now such a clear financial incentive to be in the deportation business. Catching and deporting migrants is set to be a growth industry, and the urge to see a return on the investment will help keep the machine moving. The current private prison pipeline will pale in comparison to the churn that will be needed to keep these camps filled with not just the undocumented, but the denaturalized and newly stateless, victims of the administration’s efforts to deny birthright citizenship and strip their political enemies of their rights. It will be the job of the newly hired ICE agents to find the people to transform into numbers on their monthly quota report. Already investors can see that the potential fiscal returns for exploiting human suffering are higher than they’ve been in over 150 years. As of last month, according to The Associated Press, “CoreCivic’s stock has risen in price by 56% and Geo’s by 73%” since Trump’s win last year. Those numbers are only likely to increase as a flood of cash comes gushing into the gulf between morality and maximized profits. It’s worth noting that this is all still in the realm of potential outcomes, despite the amount of money that will now be sloshing around the system. NBC News reported last month that ICE has been struggling to retain the agents it has, let alone expand the number it can hire. Moreover, filling those new billets wouldn’t happen overnight. A 2017 report from the DHS Office of the Inspector General noted with some skepticism that to hire 10,000 new ICE agents as Trump wanted even then, there’d need to be at least 500,000 applicants. But the money that Congress has now authorized means that Miller’s dreams at least have the potential to be actualized. Those funds Republicans have so thoughtlessly turned over in exchange for lower tax rates are now poised to transform America. More crops will rot on the vines as ICE raids become a more regular occurrence and the number of people doing the work dwindles. It’s the wrongful deportations like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and so many others that have drawn most of our focus to date. But it’s the supposed successes that this bill enables that will test our character as a nation.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
