Trump bill gives ICE $45 billion for detaining immigrants - more than it received in the last 15 years combined | OneFootball

The Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” domestic spending legislation, which passed Congress yesterday, will provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement about $45 billion over the next four years to spend on detaining undocumented immigrants, part of an unprecedented investment in enforcement set to turbo-charge the administration’s already sweeping campaign of arrests and deportations.

The funding is more than the federal government spent on immigration detention during the previous three presidential administrations, combined, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told Democracy Now! that the spending package, which contains about $170 billion in wider immigration and border funding, makes ICE “the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.”

“We’re talking nearly 20 years’ worth of detention funding to be spent only in a four-year period, and an increase to ICE’s enforcement budget beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, allowing the agency to expand mass deportations over the next four years to every community nationwide,” he said.

The White House has described the immigration funding as the linchpin of the Big, Beautiful Bill, more consequential even than its tax and Medicaid cuts, which are forecasted to add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade and cause 11.8 million more people to go without health coverage.

Trump administration’s Big, Beautiful Bill spending package devotes $45 billion to migrant detention, which federal officials say will fund an expansion of US detention centers to be able to hold up to 100,000 people (REUTERS)

“Everything else—the [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X of the bill earlier this week.

Federal officials plan to use the ICE windfall to roughly double the nation’s immigration detention capacity, bringing the total to between 80,000 and 100,000 detention beds.

If the administration’s current strategy holds, those beds will largely be filled by migrants who would’ve been considered low priorities in past administrations.

Among those arrested and deported under Trump so far, 61 percent had no previous criminal conviction, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Even without the historic expansion in funding, the nation’s detention system held a record number of migrants last month, over 56,000. The surge in detainees has prompted a worsening in conditions inside these facilities, according to critics.

At least 11 people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, a rate that means 2025 could be one of the worst years for migrant deaths in federal custody in decades.

In addition to funding more detention centers, the administration has taken other steps to expand its immigration and border apparatus, including transferring hundreds of miles of land on the US-Mexico border to federal control to create military exclusion zones, and fast-tracking construction of border barriers in the Rio Grande by waiving environmental laws.

The administration also plans to help Florida fund a migrant detention center in the Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” Though, Florida has yet to ask for money to help run the facility, according to court records.

A further expansion in the footprint of immigration enforcement and detention could set off domestic unrest.

ICE enforcement prompted widespread, sometimes violent, protests in Los Angeles that saw the White House send in federal troops in response, and Democratic lawmakers have been involved in a number of chaotic confrontations with law enforcement while conducting oversight visits at ICE detention facilities and immigration courts.