Senate Approves Unprecedented Spending for Mass Deportation, Ignoring What’s Broken in our Immigration System

WASHINGTON—On July 1, the U.S. Senate passed a budget reconciliation bill that includes an unprecedented allocation of funds for immigration detention and enforcement while simultaneously stripping healthcare from millions of Americans.

The bill, passed today with Vice President JD Vance contributing the tie-breaking vote, earmarks some $170 billion for immigration- and border enforcement-related funding provisions.

The bill includes:

• $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities. This represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget. It is a 62 percent larger budget than the entire federal prison system and could result in daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.
• $29.9 billion toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations, increasing ICE’s annual budget three-fold.
• Alongside this increased spending in immigration enforcement, between 12 million to 17 million people are at risk of losing their healthcare.
• Caps the number of immigration judges to 800despite record backlogs in the immigration court system.
• $46.6 billion into border wall construction—more than three times what the Trump administration spent on the wall in its first term, despite the failure of the wall to improve or contribute in any meaningful way to border management strategy.
• A new $10 billion fund to reimburse DHS for costs related to “safeguard[ing] the borders of the United States to protect against the illegal entry of persons or contraband.” This funding is nearly 50 percent of CBP’s FY 2024 budget. However, unlike a normal budget, this funding would provide very few guardrails and little guidance to DHS on how the funds must be used. As a result, this would become a slush fund for CBP to largely use however it determined.

For full analysis about what is included in the bill, see the Council’s explainer here.

Altogether, this marks the largest investment in detention and deportation in U.S. 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.

“This bill will deprive 12 to 17 million Americans of basic health care while investing unprecedented levels of funding in the president’s increasingly unpopular mass deportation agenda, which undermines public safety and creates chaos in American communities,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “At a time when polls show more Americans rejecting mass detention and deportation, this bill ignores what Americans want and doubles down on punitive policies that do nothing to address the real problems in our immigration system including court backlogs, a lack of legal pathways to citizenship, and a broken U.S. asylum system.”

The bill’s enforcement-heavy provisions come at the expense of urgently needed investments in asylum processing, legal representation, community-based alternatives to detention, and support for local governments and nonprofits serving new arrivals.

“Throwing billions at detention centers and enforcement agents is short-sighted. Instead, we should be investing in a system aimed at welcoming immigrants that contribute billions to our economy,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council. “We don’t need more jail beds and indiscriminate raids. We need balanced solutions that strengthen due process and keep families together.”

The bill will now return to the House of Representatives, where members are expected to vote on final passage later this week.

Experts at the American Immigration Council are available to talk more in-depth about the specifics of what’s included in the bill, including immigration court, border funding, what happens to unaccompanied children, the increase in ICE agents, and more.

For additional analysis about what is included in the bill, see the Council’s full explainer here.