For our November+December issue, we investigated the brutal rollout of President Donald Trump’s immigration police state: the surge in funding and manpower, the troubling arrests by masked agents, the increasing use of problematic tech, the incessant cruelty of the messaging, and the shadowy profiteers cashing in on the administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Read the whole package here.
When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July, it opened a gusher of funding for President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. On top of $46.5 billion for border wall construction, the OBBB delivered $74.9 billion to ICE—double its entire budget under Joe Biden and more than the annual military spending of all but eight countries. Of that, $45 billion will go to establishing new detention centers, including 50 by year’s end, some of them tent camps in the style of the notorious Alligator Alcatraz. Nearly $30 billion will go to enforcement and deportation, which will enable ICE to go on an unprecedented hiring spree. And that, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) noted, “is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play.”
Not only has ICE’s budget skyrocketed past those of other federal law enforcement agencies, but the money is increasingly being handed out to contractors without first collecting competing bids.
Here’s a closer look at just how big the detention state has already gotten:
It’s not just that there’s more money to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. There’s also been a shift in the kinds of folks the feds are arresting—and where they’re being arrested.
As of September, there were 186 immigration detention centers in operation. Another 50 facilities were expected to open by the end of the year.
Trump’s OBBB would pay for 10,000 additional ICE agents over the next five years—nearly twice as many as are currently employed. As of August, 100,000 people had applied for the job. But a 2017 inspector general report found it takes 500,000 applicants to make 10,000 adequate hires.
And with its expanding workforce, ICE is planning to arrest more people, in more places, and in more problematic ways than ever before.
