How Trump's big bill will supercharge his immigration crackdown

The Guardian

3 days ago

Thousands of new immigration enforcement officers. Tens of thousands of new detention beds. New fees on asylum applications. And new construction on the border wall.
Donald Trump's sweeping spending bill would vastly expand the federal government's immigration enforcement machinery and, if passed by the House, supercharge the president's plan to carry out what he has vowed will be the largest deportation campaign in US history.
The measure would authorize what analysts and advocates describe as a level of immigration enforcement spending without precedent in American history. Trump's so-called 'big, beautiful bill' dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations – a staggering sum that would make US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, and that critics warn will unleash more raids, disrupt the economy and severely restrict access to humanitarian protections like asylum.
'We've already seen aggressive, indiscriminate immigration enforcement across the country – and protests in reaction to how horribly it's been carried out,' said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. 'And we're going to see such a massive increase that most people can't even begin to wrap their heads around it.'
The 940-page bill passed the Senate on Tuesday, with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. It now returns to the House, which approved an initial draft by a single vote in May. While some elements of the spending package could still change, the immigration-related provisions in the House and Senate versions are largely aligned. And despite mounting public backlash over the Trump administration's sprawling immigration crackdown – which has separated families and even swept up US citizens – the proposal's 'unimaginable' border enforcement spending has received notably less scrutiny than its tax cuts and deep reductions to social safety net programs like Medicaid.
'It's going to fundamentally transform the immigration system,' said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council (AIC). 'It's going to transform our society.'
The Senate-passed bill would authorize $45bn to build and operate new immigration detention centers – including facilities for families – marking a 265% increase over Ice's current detention budget and enabling the detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens daily, according to an analysis by theAIC. Experts say language in the bill could allow families to be detained indefinitely, in violation of the Flores settlement, the 1997 consent decree that limits the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials.
The measure would allocate $46.6bn for border wall construction – more than three times what was spent on the barrier during Trump's first term – and provide billions in grant funding to support and expand state and local cooperation with Ice.
Though the legislation allots $3.3bn to the agency that oversees the country's immigration court system, it caps the number of immigration judges at 800, despite a massive backlog with millions of pending cases. It also imposes a series of new or elevated fees on immigration services.
Asylum seekers – those fleeing persecution – would now be subject to a $100 application fee, plus an additional $100 for every year the application is pending. (The original House bill proposed a $1,000 fee.) Currently there is no fee, and experts warn that the added financial burden would in effect restrict asylum access to those who can afford it.
The legislation would also levy new or heightened fees on work permits, nonimmigrant visas and Temporary Protected Status applications, essentially imposing what Orozco calls a 'wealth test' on some of the world's most vulnerable people.
An analysis by David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, argues that even without new funding, immigration enforcement spending was already 'extreme'. Congress had allocated nearly $34bn for immigration and border enforcement in fiscal year 2025 – more than double the combined budget for all other federal law enforcement agencies. That amount, according to the report, is about 36 times the IRS's budget for tax enforcement, 21 times the firearms enforcement budget, 13 times the drug enforcement budget, and eight times more than the FBI's.
As the bill heads to the House, it has drawn opposition from some fiscal conservatives, who are furious over projections that the package would add $3.3tn to the national deficit over the next decade, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
In a recent report based on the House's plan, Bier said CBO fails to account for the lost tax revenue from millions of immigrants who would otherwise contribute more in taxes than they receive in public benefits. He projects that mass deportations enabled by the bill could add nearly $1tn to the deficit – roughly a quarter of the bill's total price tag.
The White House insists the enforcement spending is worth it. Before the Tuesday Senate vote, Vance dismissed concerns about social safety net cuts and deficit projections, writing on X: 'The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits.' He added that the president's policy package 'fixes this problem'.
The proposed spending surge comes as the Trump administration moves aggressively to scale up arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. Despite promising a 'worst first' approach focused on violent offenders, Ice arrests of immigrants without any criminal history have skyrocketed since the start of Trump's term, according to a Guardian analysis of federal data. The number spiked even more dramatically after a meeting in late May, during which Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of Trump's hardline immigration policies, set a target of 3,000 arrests a day, or one million per year.
'Right now you have masked agents on the streets, collaborating with other federal law enforcement agencies and local law enforcement agencies, to try to meet these quotas for mass deportation,' Orozco said. 'We're just going to see that at a massively larger scale if this bill gets passed.'
Following protests that erupted last month in Los Angeles against the administration's immigration sweeps, Trump has directed immigration officials to prioritize enforcement operations in Democratic-run cities.
A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that a majority of Americans – 54% – say they believe Ice operations have gone 'too far' while nearly six in 10 do not agree that the administration's deportation policies are making the country safer.
'There's virtually no support for this mass deportation effort outside of [Trump's] rabid Maga base,' said Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster who studied Latinos and voter sentiment on immigration for decades. 'Other than that, people want immigrants to work here and to be here and to contribute to America.'
As the Senate debated the bill on Tuesday, Trump was in Florida, touring the state's new migrant detention camp built in a remote area of the everglades, known as 'Alligator Alcatraz'. 'This is a model,' Trump declared, 'but we need other states to step up.'
Critics say there's little evidence to support the White House's contention that mass deportations will benefit the American workers.
'They're going to be deporting not just workers, but also consumers,' Costa said. 'That's a pretty big share of the workforce that you're going to be impacting.'
An analysis published on Tuesday by his colleague at EPI, economist Ben Zipperer, estimates mass deportations would result in the loss of nearly 6 million jobs over the next four years, both for immigrants and US-born workers.
'There is no upside to the mass deportations enabled by the Republican budget bill,' Zipperer wrote. 'They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.'