Image by Greg Bulla.

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........

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