The Big, Ugly Budget Bill’s Monstrous ICE Spending Is Stephen Miller’s Wish Come True
The new law guts healthcare and food assistance for millions of Americans in order to fund for-profit mass detention camps and masked kidnappings targeting our immigrant neighbors.
Mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller’s lifelong, maniacal preoccupation with vilifying immigrants is now set to reach terrifying new heights under the massive and destructive budget bill recently signed into place by Donald Trump. Under the final version of the package, Miller will get an infusion of $170.7 billion dollars at the expense of working families in order to turn ICE and its secret police into the largest immigration enforcement agency in the history of our nation.
Ahead of the bill’s final passage in the House, Miller made no secret that he’d been waiting all of his life for a bill of this magnitude. Literally.
“I’ve spent my entire life in the conservative movement since I was a kid in high school, working, dreaming of the day we could have a piece of legislation like what exists right now,” he said. As Univision reported back in 2017, the mass deportation architect-in-chief has been bullying non-white people since his youth. “Univision Noticias spoke with several classmates who said Miller had few friends, none of them non-white. They said he used to make fun of the children of Latino and Asian immigrants who did not speak English well.”
But Miller’s teenage dreams will be America’s nightmare today. The law guts healthcare and food assistance for millions of poor Americans in order to pay for nearly $171 billion for brutal immigration enforcement and draconian border efforts targeting our neighbors and vulnerable individuals seeking new lives here in the United States, including:
Nearly $30 billion for turbocharged ICE abductions: The law will escalate the violent, terrifying masked kidnappings that have terrorized our communities with impunity, targeting Dreamers, grandparents, and even U.S. military members. The budget includes $29.9 billion for ICE’s deportation operations, including funding to hire as many as 10,000 additional masked agents. In addition, “it would rain money—at least $14 billion—on local law enforcement departments to incentivize them to partner with federal authorities and serve as a force multiplier for ICE,” Bolts reports. And as vulnerable Americans lose their healthcare and food assistance, potential and current ICE agents will be eligible for bonuses ranging from $15,000 to $20,000.
$45 billion for building new ICE detention camps, including migrant family jails: The bill means more human misery — and more money for private prison companies, which stand to win lucrative federal contracts to build and run detention camps. Because the overwhelming majority of detained immigrants are held in privately-operated facilities, the Trump administration’s goal to detain up to 100,000 individuals daily will result in massive financial windfalls for private prison companies. Follow the money: several were mega-donors to Trump and other mass deportation proponents. And they couldn’t be more thrilled with the law. "I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years,” private prison executive Damon Hininger told investors earlier this year, “and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career.”
Nearly $47 billion toward a useless and wasteful border wall: What originally began as a memory device to help remind Trump to demonize immigrants during rallies is now set to cost taxpayers billions and further disrupt the southwest’s precious ecosystem. The law sets aside $46.6 billion for a border wall, “more than 3 times what the Trump administration spent on the wall in his first term despite the failure of the wall to improve or contribute in any meaningful way to border management strategy,” said the American Immigration Council. And remember that during Trump’s first time, internal documents revealed that his “virtually impenetrable” wall had in fact been breached more than 3,000 times, often with tools available at any local hardware store. Like funding to build more detention camps, this is likely to benefit mega-donors aligned with Trump.
“It doesn’t stop there,” as The Boston Globe’s Marcela García wrote in her ¡Mira! newsletter, noting noxious provisions seeking to price families out of seeking asylum or appealing immigration court decisions.
“The bill imposes financial barriers and new fees on immigrant families,” she writes. “For instance, asylum applications, once free, will now cost $100 (after House Republicans originally proposed $1,000) and work permits, also once free, will now cost $550. Appeals of immigration decisions now cost $900, up from $110. For many immigrants, these fees represent an ‘unaffordable price tag on due process,’ Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told NPR.”
All in all, the funding that Miller demanded and Republicans in Congress dutifully handed over despite some previously complaining about his targets is more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget. Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at American Immigration Council, warned that ICE’s detention capacity will balloon to unprecedented levels as the administration has also taken steps to dismantle oversight mechanisms.
This will stand to leave thousands of individuals – including children – highly vulnerable to abuses with little to no form of accountability.
“There’s no reporting requirement to Congress, no oversight mechanism,” Orozco said. “And the Trump administration earlier this year gutted oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security—the civil rights and civil liberties office, the office of immigrant detention ombudsman. Those didn’t have much teeth, but they were key to be able to submit complaints about civil rights violations or issues in immigration detention. But now those agencies have been whittled down. In fact, Republicans through the appropriations process want to go further and eliminate the immigrant detention ombudsman office completely.”
“So oversight mechanisms are being whittled away—at the same time that the reconciliation process is giving billions of dollars through these broad instructions,” he continued. Since the bill’s passage, the potential risks that immigrants could face in detention have already been a morbid selling point from Trump and other mass detention proponents.
In Florida, individuals jailed at the Everglades detention camp say they’ve been fed maggot-infested food, are unable to access water and necessary medications, have to endure 24/7 lighting, and have even been denied their ability to practice their faiths. One detained man said his Bible was confiscated. They took the Bible I had and they said here there is no right to religion,” he said. “And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I'm losing my faith.”
“A lot of us have our residency documents and we don't understand why we're here," said another.
It’s unclear how early the new spending will go into effort. The bill was signed into place on Independence Day, ironic timing considering that it will usher in an unprecedented era of mass detention and state kidnappings that risk anyone that isn’t perceived to be a “real” American by this administration. Thomas Homan, the administration’s so-called “border czar,” promised that when he admitted during a recent televised interview that racial profiling is now administration policy. And remember that in the past, Homan has railed on communities simply knowing their rights.
Just a couple weeks ago, a number of House members got some PR by issuing a letter politely urging ICE to instead focus on individuals who actually do pose a public safety threat. But in the end, every single one of those six – Reps. Tony Gonzales (TX-23), Monica De La Cruz (TX-15), Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11), David Valadao (CA-22), Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27), and Gabe Evans (CO-08) – voted to give Miller and Homan all the funding they need to escalate their racial profiling-on-steroids campaign against our communities.
“Every yes vote from Congress that passed this cruel and corrupt legislation doubles down on a dangerous agenda,” said Maya Wiley, President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “an agenda that ends doctor visits for hardworking people and their families, that takes food from the mouths of children, and that callously cuts mental health support to students.”
“What does it give us instead? More ICE raids on two-year-olds and high school students, on grandparents, and on workers,” she continued. “It gives us poorer schools and richer billionaires. It literally uses our tax dollars to drive inequality and the stripping away of civil rights, which this president promises with the stroke of his poisoned pen.”