Trump's Big Ugly Bill Would Turbocharge ICE Brutality

The Republican budget would give ICE the capacity to detain over 100,000 people at a time

While Donald Trump escalates violent ICE raids, terrorizes immigrant communities, and deploys the National Guard to crack down on nonviolent protests, Republicans in Congress are trying to ram through a bill that would massively increase ICE’s capacity to terrorize our neighborhoods.

The Republican reconciliation bill guts Medicaid, SNAP, and other essential programs in order to fund billionaire handouts, but still manages to funnel billions of dollars to supercharge ICE and dramatically increase the speed and scale of mass detentions and deportations.

Here’s what’s in the bill:

• $45 billion for detentions: That’s 13 times more funding than the current ICE budget, giving them the capacity to detain over 100,000 people at a time.

• $15 billion for deportations: That’s a 500% increase to ICE’s current budget to transport and remove noncitizens, including unaccompanied children.

• $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE officers over the next five years, including $860 million in bonuses for those agents.

And that’s to say nothing of the over $50 billion the Department of Homeland Security will also receive to build a border wall and the $5 billion the Department of Defense will get for border operations, including deploying military personnel to the border. With this massive budget boost, ICE would be the highest funded law enforcement agency in the entire federal government — an agency of masked agents, shielded from accountability.

And while they exponentially ramp up detentions and deportations, the Republicans only plan to increase funding for immigration courts by a measly 30%. These courts won’t be able to keep up with the surge of cases, creating a backlog where people are detained even longer without their day in court.

Combined with DHS’s total lack of transparency about the identities and locations of the people they detained, this backlog is likely to mean that more people get lost in the system and are denied their due process. This is a recipe for Trump to disappear more members of our communities.

How we stop this

We must oppose this bill that will supercharge ICE and lead to more devastating deportations and detentions. And the best way to stop this bill is to relentlessly hammer on the politically toxic Medicaid cuts and billionaire tax giveaways.

That’s what is making Republicans in Congress sweat the most, and that’s what might slow or even stop this bill in its tracks. The more we can make Republicans squabble with each other about Medicaid cuts, the longer this legislative fight drags out, and the more opportunity we have to sink it for good. If you want to stop the awful attacks on immigrant communities in this bill, using Medicaid and billionaire giveaways as a wedge against Republicans is the best way to do it. Find out how you can take action to disrupt, delay, and defeat this bill at indivisible.org/stopthecuts.

- Trisha Maharaj, Associate Policy Director, Indivisible