President Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour “Alligator Alcatraz” on July 1.
Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
Some major elements of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, such as Medicaid and SNAP cuts, will take time to go into effect. But one portion of the law that’s likely to be implemented quickly by an eager Trump administration is the new funding authorization for immigration enforcement. This became a major selling point for otherwise-conflicted hardcore conservatives considering the legislation, as Vice-President J.D. Vance recognized in his final pitch:
When you look at the raw numbers, the megabill’s new infusion of cash for immigration enforcement seems less significant than the near-trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts and the size of some of the tax cuts. But that’s because they are concentrated on a previously small part of overall federal-government costs. It won’t be so small anymore:
Overall, the law provides $170 billion in new funding for immigration and border enforcement. A substantial $46.5 billion will go toward completing Trump’s beloved border wall. But since border crossings have dropped to very low levels this year, the administration’s more immediate priority will be supercharging ICE’s mass-deportation initiative aimed at immigrants already in the country. The megabill makes ICE the largest federal law-enforcement agency by far and channels $14 billion in new money to local law-enforcement agencies that cooperate with its work — some very serious dollars for often cash-strapped police departments. An analysis from the Cato Institute put the upsizing of ICE in perspective:
In FY 2025 — again, before [the megabill] — Congress allocated nearly $34 billion to immigration and border enforcement agencies. That’s 36 times more than what is provided for tax and financial crimes enforcement (IRS-Treasury), 21 times more than funding for firearms enforcement (ATF), 13 times more than drug enforcement (DEA), and 8 times more than the FBI budget to enforce effectively everything else. The level of border police spending is already so extreme that it has swamped nearly all other criminal law enforcement priorities for the federal government.
ICE is going to walk tall in the law-enforcement universe with a crash hiring wave on the immediate horizon, as MSNBC reports:
An analysis from the Washington Office on Latin America notes that ICE will also be getting $15 billion devoted toward physically removing migrants from the country. (Whether that is to their country of origin or some random third state is apparently a matter for the administration to decide, according to a recent Supreme Court decision.) Another $16.2 billion will be for the Department of Homeland Security to hire new ICE, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. About $8 billion of that will be for ICE to hire 8,500 new officers with another $860 million for paying recruitment and retention bonuses and $600 million for expanding the agency’s hiring capacity.
Even more visibly, the physical landscape of the United States will soon be dotted with new ICE detention facilities since the bill roughly doubles the agency’s budget for housing deportable immigrants. Since the administration is relying on fear of ICE as an incentive for “self-deportation” by immigrants, you can expect the new facilities to follow the model of South Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” hastily built and massively promoted in personal appearances by the president and his Homeland Security secretary to highlight its primitive and dangerous conditions.
Perhaps as important as the new money for ICE is the sense of urgency about ramping up mass deportation being driven by arguably the most powerful person in the White House other than Trump himself, the policy adviser and career-long immigration extremist Stephen Miller. In a fresh profile of Miller for the New York Times, Jason Zengerle treats the megabill as immensely increasing Miller’s already enormous power:
“It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.
A particularly chilling line in the profile suggests that the megabill will make ICE Miller’s “own private army.”
Precisely because some of the new legislation’s provisions will be slowly implemented and surrounded by fierce Republican efforts to downplay their significance, the deliberate visibility and cruelty of the ICE ramp-up, which will serve as MAGA porn for Trump’s base, could take center stage for the rest of the year. Get ready for an ICE Age.
