Trump’s Bill Fails to Fix What’s Broken in Our Immigration System

WASHINGTON—The American Immigration Council issued the following reaction as Congress will send Trump’s signature budget bill to his desk to sign:

“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 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.
• Caps the number of immigration judges to 800 despite record backlogs in the immigration court system.

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

Council experts are available to provide commentary and analysis on the immigration provisions in the bill and what this means for the future of immigration enforcement in the U.S.