storms & saints

The 940-page bill passed the Senate on Tuesday, with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. It now returns to the House, which approved an initial draft by a single vote in May. While some elements of the spending package could still change, the border security provisions in the House and Senate versions are largely aligned. And despite mounting public backlash over the Trump administration’s sprawling immigration crackdown – which has separated families and even swept up US citizens – the proposal’s “unimaginable” immigration enforcement spending has received notably less scrutiny than its tax cuts and deep reductions to social safety net programs like Medicaid. “It’s going to fundamentally transform the immigration system,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council (AIC). “It’s going to transform our society.” The Senate-passed bill would appropriate $45bn to build and operate new immigration detention centers – including facilities for families – marking a 265% increase over ICE’s current detention budget and enabling the detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens daily, according to an analysis by the AIC. Experts say language in the bill could allow families to be detained indefinitely, in violation of the Flores settlement, the 1997 consent decree that limits the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. The measure would allocate $46.6bn for border wall construction – more than three times what was spent on the barrier during Trump’s first term – and provide billions in grant funding to support and expand state and local cooperation with ICE. [...] An analysis by David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, argues that even without new funding, immigration enforcement spending was already “extreme”. Congress had allocated nearly $34bn for immigration and border enforcement in fiscal year 2025 – more than double the combined budget for all other federal law enforcement agencies. That amount, according to the report, is about 36 times the IRS’s budget for tax enforcement, 21 times the firearms enforcement budget, 13 times the drug enforcement budget and eight times more than the FBI’s. [...] The proposed spending surge comes as the Trump administration moves aggressively to scale up arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. Despite promising a “worst first” approach focused on violent offenders, ICE arrests of immigrants without any criminal history have soared since the start of Trump’s term, a Guardian analysis of federal data found. The number spiked even more dramatically after a meeting in late May, during which Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies, set a target of 3,000 arrests a day, or 1 million per year. “Right now you have masked agents on the streets, collaborating with other federal law enforcement agencies and local law enforcement agencies, to try to meet these quotas for mass deportation,” Orozco said. “We’re just going to see that at a massively larger scale if this bill gets passed.”