GOP Budget Bill Would Make ICE “Largest Federal Law Enforcement Agency in the History of the Nation”
Story, July 02, 2025, Watch Full Show Listen
Guests Aaron Reichlin-Melnick senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Links “What’s in the 2025 Reconciliation Bill So Far?”
The budget bill just passed by the Senate provides more than $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement and detention. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who worked on an analysis published by the American Immigration Council, says the new budget would make ICE “the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.”
Transcript: (not final)
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Much of the discussion around Trump’s budget bill has focused on the massive cuts to Medicaid, the tax giveaways to the rich, and the impact on the national debt to the tune of $3 trillion. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance, who cast the tie-breaking vote, was focused elsewhere: on immigration. He wrote on social media, quote, “Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” unquote.
This bill provides a whopping $170 billion to transform immigration enforcement and detention. This includes $45 billion for new detention jails. That’s 265% more than the current ICE detention budget and more than the budget of the federal prison system. ICE’s enforcement budget would increase by $30 billion, a threefold increase, and there’s some $46 billion for border walls and more. American Immigration Council calls the bill, quote, “the largest investment in detention and deportation in US history; a policy choice that does nothing to address the systemic failures of our immigration system while inflicting harm, sowing chaos, and tearing families apart,” unquote.
For more, we’re joined by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which just published the in-depth analysis of the immigration enforcement provisions of the bill.
Aaron, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, you have the bill being passed, eked through, needed the vice president to pass the — to cast the tie-breaking vote. And Trump wasn’t celebrating in D.C. He was deflecting attention from the millions who would lose Medicaid funding, something like 17 million, to go to what he’s calling “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades. Talk about the significance of this and this proposed massive increase to the ICE budget.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, if we look at the reconciliation bill, we can see that the amount of funding that ICE would get under this bill would be transformative for the agency. 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.
