Trump’s Budget Just Passed the Senate. Brace for a Massive Increase in ICE Raids.
Masked immigration enforcers have swept through American cities in the months since President Donald Trump took office, using flash bangs during restaurant sweeps, slamming people’s heads into the ground, violently arresting gardeners on video, and provoking mass protests against their raids. This may only be the beginning.
The massive Senate budget bill, which passed on Tuesday and awaits a final House vote, gives Donald Trump’s administration the money to rapidly ramp up mass deportation to unprecedented levels, according to immigration experts.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have a budget for more officers than the FBI. The nation’s immigration detention centers will have more funding than the federal Bureau of Prisons.
There may be only one limit on how fast the Trump administration can spend: how quickly it can hire.
“It is hard for people to imagine what immigration enforcement is going to look like once all this money goes,” said Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank. “It already looks really bad and scary, like we’re turning into a police state and surveillance state. The orders of magnitude are going to be multiplied.”
Incentive to Spend
The dueling House and Senate bills differ on details but agreed on a key point: Both would massively expand federal spending on immigration enforcement.
Overall, the Senate version will dedicate $175 billion to an immigration crackdown, including an extra $30 billion for ICE, which can be spent over four years. To put that in perspective, ICE’s current budget is about $8 billion per year.
The bill also designates $45 billion for detention facilities, which can also be spent at any time over the next four years. By comparison, the U.S. spends about $8 billion a year on the Bureau of Prisons.
Although the Senate budget bill contains a dizzying array of provisions, ranging from tax breaks for the........
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