Funding for federal law enforcement and prisons would skyrocket under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Republicans are coalescing around in Congress, giving an unprecedented boost to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda and efforts to militarize the United States.
“It’s going to be unrecognizable in American history, the level of immigration enforcement [and] street harassment that you will see by Border Patrol, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and all the law enforcement they have helping them out,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told NBC News Friday.
“The average American probably hasn’t seen an ICE raid in action, but they will if this bill passes,” he added. “It’s going to be everywhere.”
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The bill would provide $45 billion to build immigration jails “for single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity” — a 13-fold increase over ICE’s 2024 detention budget, according to a National Immigration Law Center analysis.
A separate part of the bill allocates $29.9 billion in additional funding for ICE activities, including hiring thousands of new immigration agents and giving them five-figure signing and retention bonuses, as well as for transportation contracts to shuttle migrants between detention centers and out of the country, Migrant Insider reported.
Customs and Border Protection would get $46.6 billion for border wall construction and even more for facilities ($5 billion), personnel ($4.1 billion), bonuses ($2.05 billion) and vehicles ($855 million).
These are monumental numbers, particularly considering the year-to-year budgets for ICE and CBP have, to date, been around $10 billion and $18 billion, respectively. (Current immigration and border enforcement funding is itself greater than all other federal law enforcement combined, Bier has noted, and reflects the increasing criminalization of unauthorized immigration, particularly since the 1990s.)
Elsewhere in Republicans’ bill, $10 billion has been allocated for a “State Border Security Reinforcement Fund,” which would compensate states that build their own border walls, “interdict” unauthorized migrants and “relocate” those migrants elsewhere in the country.
This might be used, for example, to reimburse Texas for its Operation Lone Star program, in which billions of state tax dollars have been used to arrest migrants, particularly those attempting to pursue asylum, and transport them to major Democratic-leaning cities like New York and Chicago.
Bier has predicted that though the bill outlines one-time expenditures on immigration enforcement, future legislators and presidents won’t let them expire, meaning that massively heightened funding could become the norm for federal law enforcement agencies.
Trump is already aggressively using federal law enforcement officers outside their normal responsibilities. Typically, for example, Customs and Border Protection personnel man the actual U.S.-Mexico border, ports of entry like airports, and checkpoints within 100 miles of the border. But in his second term, Trump has authorized federal law enforcement officers from across the government — including Border Patrol, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and even postal inspectors and State Department diplomatic security — to assist with immigration arrests.
To pay for this massive spike in immigration enforcement, as well as Republicans’ expansive tax cuts for the wealthy, the legislation would make historic cuts to America’s social safety net while also exploding the national debt.