Early on Thursday May 22, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill with a historically massive mix of budget cuts and new spending. The cuts are likely to hurt the poorest Americans. The spending is likely to change the face of U.S. migration enforcement in ways that the United States may feel for decades.
The bill now goes on to the Senate. It is advancing under an infrequently invoked legislative rule called “ reconciliation,” allowing it to pass the Senate on a simple majority, without the filibuster rule that usually requires 60 out of 100 senators’ votes to end debate and vote. Both chambers’ Republican majorities seek to pass this bill even if it lacks a single Democratic vote. The Senate will now consider and pass its version of the bill, then both houses will resolve differences and send it to President Trump for his signature, likely by July.
The “reconciliation” bill includes some measures that will be especially onerous to the migrant population in the United States, like huge fees to apply for statuses, bars to receiving assistance, and a new tax on transfers of money (remittances) for non-citizens. There’s a lot to break down, but this piece focuses on the incredible scale of what the U.S. Congress is proposing to spend on enforcement and border security. The reconciliation bill’s mammoth dimensions are not getting the attention and scrutiny that they deserve.
We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill. The House version would provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with over $160 billion in new border and immigration enforcement resources over the next four and a half years. That dwarfs what the Bush administration spent on border and immigration enforcement following the September 11, 2001 attacks ( $38.7 billion, or about $70 billion in current dollars).
The bill throws money at a long list of items that would roughly double the current annual budgets of DHS’s main border and migration enforcement agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A $12 billion provision added at the last minute would reimburse Texas’s state government for “Operation Lone Star,” a Biden-era border crackdown. And it does so with very vague language: most of these multi-billion-dollar outlays say very little about how the money should be spent, leaving the Trump administration with very broad flexibility.
Let’s consider just five items in the bill.
1. $46.5 billion for border barrier construction.
“Planned investments,” the House Homeland Security Committee reported, “include: completion of 701 miles of primary [border] wall, construction of 900 miles of river barriers, 629 miles of secondary barriers, and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers.”
How much is $46.5 billion? Adjusted for inflation, it would be:
- 2.7 times what the first Trump administration spent building over 400 miles of new 30-foot-tall border wall ( $16.45 billion minus an unspent $2.2 billion 2020 dollars).
- 1.7 times the value of all the USAID programming that the Trump administration unlawfully canceled in 2025 ($27.7 billion).
- About a quarter of the cost of the entire Apollo space program of the 1960s and 1970s ($25.4 billion in 1973 dollars).
- 1.2 years of operating a universal free pre-K program for all U.S. children ($351 billion, in 2022 dollars, over 10 years)
- The equivalent of providing $6,300 to each migrant whom Border Patrol apprehended at the US-Mexico border during the entire Biden administration, including multiple handouts for repeat crossers (about 7.4 million apprehensions).
$46.5 billion will be more than enough to wall off every environmentally sensitive area in the U.S. Southwest and the basin of the Rio Grande Valley. It will be enough to strip the properties of thousands living near the Rio Grande, using eminent domain and overcoming legal challenges. It will be enough to force giant walls to be built through cities that do not want them on their riverfront, like Laredo, Texas.
All of that for barriers that did nothing to deter millions of migrants and asylum seekers during the first three years after the first Trump administration took office and the pandemic subsided. Walls have little effect on protection-seeking migrants who are seeking to be apprehended in the first place.
2. $45 billion for adult and family detention.
That would be enough to detain 100,000 people at a time, perhaps more. The New York Times reported in early April that ICE had already requested proposals from contractors who run detention facilities. Add another $3 billion for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to hold migrant children who arrive unaccompanied.
How much is that combined $48 billion? Adjusted for inflation, it would be:
- Enough to cancel the debt of 1,240,814 student loan holders ( averaging $38,375 each).
- A generous estimate of what it would cost to end U.S. homelessness for 19 months ($30 billion per year).
- 1.6 times the global revenue of the entire music industry in 2024 ($29.6 billion in 2024 dollars).
- More than enough to build a new stadium for all 30 Major League Baseball teams (the Oakland As’ new stadium in Las Vegas is expected to cost $1.5 billion).
- More than Netflix’s forecast worldwide revenue from its 300 million-plus subscribers in 2025 ($43.5 to $44.5 billion).
ICE’s detention budget in 2024 totaled $3.43 billion to hold 41,500 people at a time. This bill would quadruple that capacity, adding $9 billion per year over the next five years (including 2025). Few countries in history have witnessed the level of mass detention that this could enable, most of it happening in facilities with notoriously miserable conditions, run by private companies and so resistant to oversight that mayors and members of Congress are now facing charges for attempting to perform it.
3. $15 billion to beef up ICE’s capacity to deport migrants.
That includes $14.4 billion for transportation and removal of noncitizens, $500 million to remove people via land borders, and $100 million to repatriate unaccompanied children.
How much is $15 billion? Adjusted for inflation, it would be:
- Enough to build the Empire State Building 18 times ($41 million in 1931 dollars).
- More than enough to build a new Large Hadron Collider ($9 billion in 2010 dollars).
- Enough to build 17 Golden Gate Bridges ($35 million in 1933 dollars).
4. $16.2 billion to hire new ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol agents.
This includes $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE personnel; $4.1 billion to hire 3,000 new Border Patrol agents, 5,000 CBP Office of Field Operations Officers, 200 new Air and Marine Operations agents, and 290 support staff; $2.05 billion for CBP retention bonuses and signing incentives; $860 million for bonuses to recruit and retain ICE personnel; $600 million for ICE hiring capacity; and $600 million for for CBP recruitment and vetting.
How much is $16.2 billion? Adjusted for inflation, it would be:
- Enough to build the Hoover Dam 16 times ($49 million in 1931 dollars).
- Nearly identical to the amount the UN World Food Program says it needs “to address the humanitarian needs of 123 million vulnerable people in 2025” ($16.9 billion).
- Enough to build New York’s original World Trade Center 6 times ($400 million in 1973 dollars).
- Enough to build its replacement, the One World Trade Center “Freedom Tower,” 4 times ($3.9 billion in 2014 dollars).
5. $12 billion to reimburse states (mainly Texas) for past border security spending.
A provision added to the House bill at the last minute provides $12 billion for “State Border Security Reimbursement.” It responds to Texas’s Republican state government’s repeated requests for a federal government payout to reimburse Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown, which began in 2021. Operation Lone Star jailed tens of thousands of asylum seekers for “trespassing,” had troops push families back into the Rio Grande, and bused migrants to Democratic-governed cities at over $1,900 per seat. It had no discernible effect on migration to Texas, which did not decline any more sharply there in 2024 than it did in other border states.
How much is $12 billion? Adjusted for inflation, it would be:
- About equal to the budget of the Head Start preschool program for low-income families ($11 billion in 2022 dollars).
- Enough to make 26 Avengers sequels with the same budget as Avengers: Endgame ($356 million in 2019 dollars).
- 22 times the annual budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports PBS and NPR stations around the country ($545 million).
- Enough to build 551 miles of four-lane urban freeway, with overpasses ($20.31 million per mile in 2023 dollars).
- Significantly greater than the global budget of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR, $10.632 billion)
It’s not too late to vote “no”
Even as it sails through the Republican-controlled Congress, we have yet to have a real national reckoning with what an injection of resources this size truly means. This bill threatens to be a “before and after moment” for border communities, for the role of the military in internal-law enforcement, for the most fundamental rights of migrants, and possibly for the demographic future of the United States and its residents’ ability to live securely with clear due process guarantees. $160 billion is enough to make the United States a vastly different, less welcoming, less free, poorer nation. As the “reconciliation” bill moves to their chamber, Senators should closely examine the ethical and human rights implications of this legislation and, at a minimum, do the staggering math, as laid out here.
