It is difficult to convey the scale of the harm that will result from the enormous spending bill that the U.S. Congress narrowly passed, and President Trump signed into law, in the run-up to July 4 (Public Law 119-21, which some call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” although the final version does not carry that title). The bill dedicates over $170 billion to immigration enforcement and border hardening between now and the end of fiscal year 2029.
U.S. border communities, migrants living in the United States, and all citizens who value living in a free society must brace ourselves by taking a clear-eyed view of what the Trump administration has already done with far less money, and how this new law will multiply these efforts.
The amounts that Congress ultimately approved are in the “Senate Bill” column of this graphic, but the “House Bill” column, which closely follows it, gives a fuller sense of individual line items.
Border walls
In 2019, during his first term, Trump shut down the U.S. government for 35 days when the House of Representatives’ Democratic majority refused to appropriate more money to build border walls. Days after he relented, Trump used emergency powers to wrest money from the Defense Department’s budget for more wall construction, defying the will of Congress.
Those budgetary raids, combined with the money approved by a Republican-majority Congress in 2017 and 2018, ultimately allocated $16.45 billion during Trump’s first administration for building walls along the U.S.-Mexico border, with perhaps a quarter of the funds remaining unspent by 2021. That was enough to build 458 miles of tall pedestrian-blocking border barriers, 282 miles in areas where those didn’t exist before.
The figure of “$16.45 billion, about a quarter unspent” is dwarfed by what Congress just approved: $46.5 billion “for construction, installation, or improvements of primary, waterborne, and secondary barriers, as well as technology upgrades such as, but not limited to, lighting, surveillance systems, smart access roads, and fiber optic cables.” One single bill has given the Trump administration more than triple the border wall-building budget that it only obtained last time after fighting Congress to a shutdown.
ICE raids and arrests
In late May, the Trump administration’s principal immigration hardliner, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, demanded that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) begin arresting undocumented immigrants in the United States at a previously unheard-of rate of 3,000 people per day. While ICE has not yet reached that quota, it is now exceeding 2,000 per day at times, and the results have shocked the American public.
Migrants with no criminal background are now a large and growing percentage of the population being rounded up and detained everywhere. While the number of convicted criminals in ICE custody is 1.6 times what it was before Trump’s term began, the number with zero convictions or charges has multiplied nearly 14-fold, according to Syracuse University researcher Austin Kocher. People whom ICE classifies as “Other Immigration Violators”—meaning that they have no prior convictions and face no criminal charges—now comprise 32 percent of the agency’s detained population; that is up from just 6 percent in January, Kocher notes.
Every day brings new mobile phone videos of masked agents, often with unmarked vehicles and no identification or insignia, grabbing people, including parents with children, off of streets, from workplaces, and even from immigration court hearings. For more than a month, the city of Los Angeles has been witnessing daily hyper-aggressive tactics. A lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Southern California on July 2 describes the new reality:
“The raids in this District follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind.”
The ACLU lawsuit complaint includes this image of ICE (or possibly Border Patrol) agents raiding a flea market in Los Angeles.
A climate of fear pervades. A small business owner in Los Angeles told the New York Times “that everyone in the community was afraid of being picked up by immigration agents, including those who have legal status. He said that agents did not seem to care whether people had immigration papers if they were Latino.” In El Paso, “People are afraid to go out for groceries. They’re afraid to go to church,” Roman Catholic Bishop Mark Seitz told Puente News Collaborative. “I really don’t believe fear adequately describes it. It’s terror.”
That is just a taste of what is to come now that P.L. 119-21 has passed. ICE had been carrying out these operations at Biden-era spending levels. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Division, with about 5,500 agents nationwide, had a budget of $5.1 billion in 2024; the division received much of ICE’s overall $485 million increase in the 2025 Continuing Resolution that maintained most of the federal budget at last year’s levels.
P.L. 119-21 multiplies this amount, thereby increasing ICE’s capacity to conduct these aggressive operations. The agency now has more than $13 billion in additional funds to spend over the next four years to hire at least 10,000 new agents—more than doubling the deportation force, though recruitment could move slowly—and to purchase vehicles, equipment, software, and similar items. Other funds in the bill may enable Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to hire 8,500 new people, including 3,000 new agents (a 15 percent increase) for CBP’s Border Patrol component.
The increased tempo of ICE operations is certain to come with more support for logistics and protection from the U.S. armed forces, as we are seeing in Los Angeles, Florida, and throughout the border region. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has already requested that the Department of Defense provide 20,000 National Guard troops to support domestic mass deportation operations. This is a big new internal mission for the U.S. military, and it will increase the probability of historically rare confrontations between U.S. soldiers and civilians on U.S. soil. That would do severe harm to the U.S. military’s long-standing status as an apolitical force that respects democracy and focuses on defending the nation, rather than enforcing its domestic laws.
Migrant detention
Congress appropriated enough funding to ICE in 2024 and 2025 to hold 41,500 people at a time in its network of detention facilities, most of which are run by private corporations. Right now, though, the Trump administration has increased ICE detention in the U.S. interior so rapidly that the agency is now holding nearly, or more than, 58,000 people.
Barely a day passes without new reports of dreadful, unhealthy, dangerous, and cruel conditions throughout ICE’s network: from detention centers all around the country to Florida’s new, notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” to the family detention sites that the Trump administration has reopened in Texas.
At least 10 people have died in ICE custody since January 1, 2025. Reports abound of people forced to sleep on floors, unable to bathe for days, being fed as little as one meal per day, denied medical care, and getting so little access to water that adults compete with children for available bottles.
P.L. 119-21 will expand this grim, privatized, and unaccountable detention network to a degree that is difficult to envision. ICE’s 2024 detention budget was $3.4 billion, up from $2.9 billion in 2023. The new law will give ICE and its detention contractors an additional $45 billion to spend on detention over the next 4 years and 3 months.
That averages out to a fourfold increase in ICE’s detention budget. The American Immigration Council estimates that this could enable the agency to hold at least 125,000 people at a time, “only just a bit below the current population of the entire federal prison system.” And now that the Trump administration has eviscerated DHS’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office and its Detention Ombudsman’s Office, those who suffer abuse in these detention facilities will have even less recourse than what little they had before.
The prospect of hundreds of thousands of people warehoused in for-profit camps all around the United States is unlike anything the United States, or nearly any other democracy, has ever witnessed before. Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling On Tyranny, warns of “an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.” And the Trump administration now has the resources to do it.
Deportation
Those who value human rights have also been shocked by the Trump administration’s stepped-up deportations. It is not just the pace of flights taking people out of the United States, which increased 63 percent in June compared to the February-to-April average. It is the administration’s insistence on deporting protection-seeking people to countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, where they are likely to suffer retribution from repressive governments, or their shipment of people to third countries of which they are not citizens, like the approximately 252 Venezuelan men who disappeared into in El Salvador’s feared CECOT mega-prison; the 500 Asian, African, and Middle Eastern migrants sent to Costa Rica and Panama, the Mexican and Cuban citizens sent along with people from Asian nations to South Sudan, or the 663 shuttled through the notorious Guantanamo Bay naval facility in Cuba.
Deportation operations, too, are now set to multiply with the passage of P.L. 119-21. ICE’s budget for transportation and removal operations in 2024 was $721 million, up from $421 million in 2023. Now, the newly passed bill is lavishing ICE and its transportation contractors with $14.4 billion over the next four years and three months. That is in addition to half a billion dollars for land-border deportations into Mexico and $100 million for deportations of unaccompanied children.
Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border counted 209 removal flights in June. ICE will now have more than four times the budget for such flights. Videos of exhausted, shackled people—including families—being loaded onto aircraft, which the administration gleefully shares on its social media accounts, are about to get posted far more frequently.
The stepped-up deportations, and the Trump administration’s intense pressure on governments to accept returns of their own and third countries’ citizens, will harm U.S. relations with Latin America. Those relations are already buckling under new trade restrictions, hints of military interventions, and declarations of solidarity with far-right leaders. “Central American countries will be most affected, as their reception and reintegration services for returned migrants will be further strained due to the shuttering of USAID, which previously supported such efforts,” warned former Biden administration officials Eric Jacobstein and Emily Mendrala. They and other analysts foresee economic harm resulting from a drop in financial remittances to the region from migrants in the United States, caused in part by P.L. 119-21’s addition of a 1 percent tax on all money transfers.
For some, a giant payday
The U.S. government does not have a large core of in-house border wall builders and detention operators, nor a fleet of deportation planes. It pays private, for-profit corporations for most of those services. Those corporations are about to see a windfall from P.L. 119-21 that exceeds their wildest expectations.
Some who stand to gain the most include:
- Detention center and prison operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic, along with companies like Deployed Resources that specialize in setting up large tent facilities. “Since Trump’s reelection in November, CoreCivic’s stock has risen in price by 56 percent and Geo’s by 73 percent,” the Associated Press reported in mid-June.
- Companies that provide hardware and software used for surveillance, data mining, facial recognition, and similar activities that raise strong civil liberties concerns, such as Palantir, Cellebrite, Anduril, and many others. As the only supplier of border sensor towers with AI-powered “autonomous capabilities,” Anduril—whose founder is a longtime funder of Donald Trump’s campaigns—stands to profit from language in P.L. 119-21 specifying that funding only go to towers with those capabilities.
- Companies that carry out border wall construction, like North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, which received contracts to build wall segments during the first Trump administration and was just chosen to build a $309 million segment in Arizona.
- Charter plane companies like GlobalX and CSI Aviation, which ICE relies on for deportation flights.
- In Texas, where most land along the borderline is privately owned, much of the $46.5 billion that P.L. 119-21 would devote to border-wall construction may go to landowners compelled to sell some of their property to the government, or to legal fees if landowners seek to challenge those eminent domain claims.
A body blow to a free society
In the United States, most police forces operate under the authority of states or municipalities. There is no national, federal police force: for most of its history, the United States’ federal agencies with the capacity to arrest people—like the FBI, the DEA, and border and migration agencies—were quite small until the period after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Even during that period, agencies focused on border security usually limited their operations to border zones.
P.L. 119-21 may bring that to an end. ICE is now poised “to be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined,” observed Michael Tomasky at the New Republic. The agency’s annual budget could exceed $30 billion per year when combined with regular appropriations—more than the defense budgets of all but about 15 countries.
The giant budget increase will make ICE a super-charged national law enforcement force. A force with a larger capacity to engage in unlawful racial profiling and to detain people without warrants while hiding faces, names, and even agency identities. A force augmented with powerful surveillance capabilities like AI, drones, facial recognition, location data, data-mining, and unification of databases that until now had been held deliberately separate.
P.L. 119-21 is throwing massive amounts of money at an agency already in need of deep reform, as it suffers from longstanding management, accountability, and organizational culture challenges. ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration. “It already has some of the lowest hiring standards in federal law enforcement,” journalist Garrett Graff, the author of a much-cited 2014 analysis of institutional problems at Border Patrol, whose newsletter recently explored these concerns, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “It already has one of the shortest training periods in federal law enforcement. It already has some of the lowest educational requirements of any federal law enforcement agency.” As the Trump administration has dismantled DHS internal oversight bodies and maintained an Inspector-General with a poor record of investigating human rights complaints, ICE begins this new period more unfettered than ever.
While unfettered, the agency is also increasingly politicized. “We’ve never seen anything in modern U.S. history like the fast-rising social stigma and politicization of ICE as an agency and brand in terms of recruiting,” Graff observed, warning of a hiring surge made up of “a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.” A close alignment with President Trump’s political views also suffuses Border Patrol, whose union—which claims a membership rate of 90 percent of agents—backed Donald Trump in all three of his campaigns, aggressively aligning its messaging with Trump’s agenda.
As they experience another period of steep growth, these politicized agencies will come into much more frequent contact with U.S. citizens, including those who disagree with the Trump administration’s policies, as we have seen in Los Angeles. What may happen then is worrying: the large, mostly pro-MAGA federal police forces now being created might come to confront the President’s political adversaries, even as the administration prods the still-apolitical military to follow suit.
The warnings from journalists and scholars are coming rapidly.
- “That new normal may come as a shock to Americans unused to a federal national police force operating inside the country,” wrote CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf. “The megabill Trump signed last week will elevate ICE in the American consciousness and on American streets.”
- “We’re seeing other clues that police-state tactics are intensifying in America,” Andrea Pitzer, author of a history of concentration camps, wrote at MSNBC. “Masked agents in unmarked cars or without warrants who refuse to show IDs are sweeping people off the street. Some who vanish reemerge; others have been effectively disappeared.”
- ICE’s funding increase is “enough to pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about achieving,” Nick Miroff wrote at the Atlantic.
- “I fear that Congress just passed legislation hastening our transformation toward a federal police state unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our history,” Graff wrote in his newsletter.
- “The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants,” wrote Harvard government and sociology professor Theda Skocpol. “They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can. This is the key story unfolding right now.”
If this nightmare vision is realized—and we must work tirelessly to guarantee that it does not—the passage of P.L. 119-21 will have made it possible.
This is unpopular
Dark days are ahead. If there is any solace, it’s that not a single member of the opposition Democratic Party voted for this bill, while many Republicans had strong doubts even as most voted “yea.” Religious, faith coalitions, immigrant rights organizations, environmental organizations, and others mobilized widely to protest P.L. 119-21. Polling, meanwhile, shows this bill, and the administration’s anti-immigrant overreach, to be unpopular.
That gives us something to build on: most Americans are emphatic about their desire to live in inclusive, safe, affordable, and sustainable communities, not xenophobic police states. While this bill makes this goal more distant, it is ever more important that we continue to articulate this vision and build it in all available spaces. As the horrors that P.L. 119-21 unleashes turn more people against it, we must lay the groundwork for reversing the harm and for building a practical, realistic, and rights-based approach to immigration.
