The so-called One Big Beautiful Act allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States. The bill adds billions of dollars to border enforcement, but the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.
Although the population of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has remained fairly constant over the past 10 years, overall immigration has increased since the 1970s, and increased funding has been needed to fairly and efficiently address that growth. But the scale and focus of the increases are startling. The July 2025 funding package appropriates huge sums for deportations while neglecting processes that are needed for a fair and workable immigration system, such as immigration judges to ensure citizens or immigrants are not erroneously deported. The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine. Most detention facilities will be operated by for-profit private prison corporations and other private contractors, creating strong economic and political interests that will make the new apparatus very difficult to dismantle.
Taken together long-term detention and surveillance contracts, rapid hiring increases for enforcement, and new monetary incentives for reprioritizing law enforcement on immigration will create a deportation-industrial complex—an enforcement machine with financial and political constituencies that will outlast this administration.
Scale and Recipients of the July 2025 Funding
The biggest piece of the pie for enforcement operations in the United States will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. Congress gave ICE $75 billion over four years, approximately $18.7 billion each year. Added to the $10 billion Congress already appropriated ICE for fiscal year 2025 in March, ICE now has $28.7 billion at its disposal this year. That $28.7 billion figure is nearly triple ICE’s entire budget for FY24.
Two-thirds of ICE’s funding – $45 billion over four years – will be used to detain immigrants, potentially more than 100,000 people per year. The $11.25 billion added to ICE’s annual detention budget is a 400% increase from last year and exceeds the Department of Justice budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 for the entire federal prison system, which holds 155,000 people.
The law explicitly allows ICE to build more facilities to jail families, often mothers with their children, and does not limit how long they can be detained, an apparent contravention of a decades-old settlement that limits the detention of children to 20 days.
The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers. That amount is a 300% increase over ICE’s entire $10 billion prior-year budget.
The bill also allocates billions of dollars to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which already received a $20 billion dollar appropriation for fiscal year 2025. The July funding bill gives CBP almost $65 billion more over 4 years, nearly $47 billion of which is earmarked for continued construction of a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border . This is a stark increase from the amount allocated to the border wall during the first Trump administration, when Congress appropriated $5 billion and President Trump ordered the Department of Defense to divert an additional $10 billion.
The remaining $18.2 billion for CBP in the July funding bill will go to hiring, facilities, technology, and surveillance. Surveillance of border communities already raises significant privacy concerns that CBP has failed to address. A funding surge will enable CBP to supercharge those efforts, further invading the privacy of citizens and noncitizens alike and eroding trust in the government.
Additional funds to support immigration enforcement go to state and local jurisdictions with more than $10 billion for border-related law enforcement support. Congress also gave the Department of Defense $1 billion and established an unrestricted $10 billion fund that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security can allocate for any border enforcement purposes.
The administration has already significantly increased pressure on local jurisdictions to enter agreements with ICE to assist with immigration enforcement. Funneling huge sums to state and local jurisdictions will likely divert them from their core law enforcement priorities. The $10 billion unrestricted fund – an amount equal to ICE’s entire budget last year – gives DHS a huge immigration enforcement carrot to dangle in front of DHS components, private contractors, and local and state law enforcement agencies, enticing them to seek those funds to carry out DHS priorities with minimal accountability.
How does this compare to other law-enforcement spending?
The $170 billion price tag for immigration enforcement eclipses other law enforcement expenditures at the federal, state, and local level. It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.
Even the slice that goes just to ICE this year – nearly $29 billion – exceeds the budgets for all other non-immigration federal law enforcement functions put together, eclipsing funding to agencies whose law enforcement missions involve pursuing terrorists, violent criminals, sex offenders, fentanyl and other drug traffickers, and gun traffickers.
Does the entire immigration system receive funding?
No. The law substantially increases funds for deportations without providing any money to make the system more fair or functional. While the administration is planning to deport a million immigrants each year, the law does not significantly increase access to the immigration courts — which already have a backlog of nearly 4 million cases — to assess whether they are citizens or otherwise entitled to stay in the United States.
In fact, the funding bill caps hiring of new immigration judges over the next three and a half years at 800 new judges. That’s a 14% increase compared to a 400% increase in funding for immigration detention centers. The disparity signals a plan to dispense with due process in deportations or to let immigrants languish in detention centers while waiting for a hearing. The current corps of immigration judges is already stretched desperately thin, particularly in the wake of the administration’s termination of 65 immigration judges, all of whom are career employees.
The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine.
The administration has also moved to halt all legal orientation and support programs that help vulnerable immigrants navigate the complex immigration system, including programs that help children and families separated during the first administration. In addition, there is no money in the bill to support the processing of lawful immigration or citizenship applications by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which already has a record 11.3 million pending cases.
Who is ICE targeting for arrest and detention?
Although the administration repeatedly said it is deporting the “worst of the worst,” its enforcement efforts are sweeping in many people with no criminal records to meet the White House goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day. ICE also changed its policy to allow arrests in places that had been considered off-limits, so now agents are arresting mothers in front of their children as they take them to school, immigrants as they go to church, and asylum seekers when they seek protection in immigration courts.
The administration has also abruptly changed the rules. Immigrants who applied for and were granted legal or protected status have seen that status terminated and are now targets of the administration’s enforcement actions as well. They include immigrants who were lawfully paroled into the country, along with people with temporary protected status from countries experiencing ongoing civil unrest or environmental disasters. The same is true for individuals whose deportation had been deferred for humanitarian reasons such as children who are awaiting visas because they were abandoned or abused. The government is moving swiftly to arrest, detain, and deport them. The surge of new funding will increase the number of people it can target.
What do these allocations signal about the administration’s priorities?
The administration argues that ramped-up immigration enforcement is needed to improve public safety and national security and that it is prioritizing immigration enforcement over all other law enforcement efforts, even though research indicates that immigrants do not drive up crime rates. Nevertheless, the administration has pulled FBI, drug, and gun agents away from their core missions to help pursue immigrants. It also has cut crime prevention programs that supported efforts to reduce violence and criminal justice research across 48 states and territories. For fiscal year 2026, the administration is proposing further funding cuts, including eliminating 1,500 FBI employees, defunding other law enforcement agencies, and cutting vital programs designed to keep Americans safe.
In short, all other federal public safety efforts now take a back seat to arresting and detaining immigrants – the vast majority of whom do not have a criminal record. Similarly, the administration’s funding allocation makes clear that deportation is the top priority, even if other core values – like due process to ensure the law is accurately applied – may be compromised.
What are the risks of the rapid, massive funding surge?
ICE will likely rush to spend its full allocation of funds, but it takes more than money to build detention facilities, hire additional staff, and buy equipment. It also requires staff to do the hiring and to ensure compliance with rules governing hiring and procurement. The rush to spend money fast is likely to result in large amounts of funding flowing to private contractors, with pressure to cut corners.
Private prison firms will reap most of the financial benefits of the detention budget, as nearly 90 percent of people in ICE custody are already held in for-profit prisons. Months before the president signed the budget bill in July, ICE already had solicited contracts from private firms, setting up an expedited contract process. The two largest for-profit companies have been significant financial supporters of the president and one has hired several former high-level ICE officials. Oversight of these private facilities is significantly diminished because the administration has gutted the oversight offices at DHS and is defying some efforts at Congressional oversight.
The rush to spend a 300% budget increase will also strain ICE’s ability to hire quality staff (roughly 10,000 deportation officers). According to a 2017 Inspector General report, to hire 10,000 officers, ICE would need 500,000 applicants, but the push to hire comes at a time when law enforcement agencies nationwide have had difficulty filling their ranks and unemployment rates are low.
ICE already has special hiring authority that allows it to bypass the usual rigorous hiring procedures for federal employees, and deportation officers are not required to meet the same requirements as other federal law enforcement officers, such as having prior law enforcement experience. Pressure to hire quickly risks further lowering the bar or taking additional short cuts that are more likely to lead to hiring people whose work or criminal history should be disqualifying. Past efforts to accelerate the hiring of 5,000 CBP officers – half of the goal for new ICE hires – resulted in corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling organizations, that far exceeded rates of corruption at other law enforcement agencies.
What should happen instead?
An enforcement-heavy posture — with detention largely outsourced to for-profit companies— will build a durable deportation infrastructure that is hard to reverse once funding, contracts, and staffing are locked in. Once an agency receives funding and begins hiring and entering contracts for firms to build facilities and ramp up the nation’s immigrant detention apparatus, expectations for continued funding become entrenched, making it difficult to reverse the trend.
Instead of a deportation-only approach, funding should be balanced to screen for humanitarian claims like asylum; process more legal immigration applications; and hire enough judges to hold immigration court hearings. We are a nation of laws — including immigration laws — and a core American principle embedded in our Constitution is that everyone is entitled to due process to make sure that the law is being applied faithfully and accurately. Funding choices should reflect that principle.
