On April 30, the House Judiciary Committee advanced a budget reconciliation bill which, if signed into law, would represent the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States. The bill would provide nearly $80 billion for internal immigration enforcement, including $45 billion dollars for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention and $14.4 billion for ICE transportation and removal operations. This adds to the nearly $67 billion the House is also planning to give to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including $51.6 billion for border barriers. On top of these staggering sums of money, the House Judiciary bill would also impose mandatory fees on a wide variety of humanitarian immigration protections, putting them out of reach for most applicants.
“Reconciliation” is an annual congressional budgetary process which permits members of Congress to bypass the normal rules around the filibuster in the Senate, allowing the passage of a budget bill with a simple majority vote in both houses. Currently, the House and Senate GOP disagree on the exact terms of the reconciliation bill, so the details coming out of the House bill may change once the bill is considered in the Senate. As a result, these proposals may not become law as currently written. However, they represent a clear starting point for GOP negotiations around the budget reconciliation process.
Should these funds be appropriated by Congress, over the next few years ICE could ramp up mass deportation operations to a level never before seen in American history, making ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the entire federal government, with an army of officers fanning out into communities to carry out enormous arrest operations, while the agency paid private prison contractors billions to stand up new detention centers and massively ramp up deportation flights.
Under the House Judiciary bill, ICE would be given $45 billion to spend on detention through September 30, 2029. This would be a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis over ICE’s current $3.4 billion detention budget, putting ICE’s annual detention budget at $12.4 billion. By contrast, the federal Bureau of Prisons currently has a budget of $8.3 billion, meaning that Congress could give ICE a budget for detention that is nearly 50% larger than the entire federal prison system.
The budget would also provide ICE $14.4 billion for transportation and removal operations, an astronomic 500% annual increase from the current $721 million provided in the current budget. Along with this funding would come eight billion dollars to hire 10,000 new ICE officers over the next five years, as well as $858 million for retention and signing bonuses and $600 million to hire sufficient human resources personnel to carry out that level of mass hiring.
At the same time as Congress seeks to ramp up detention, arrests, and removals, it would give a measly 30% increase to the immigration court budget. This raises the serious possibility that ICE would build detention centers faster than judges could come on board to reduce backlogs. As a result, people would be held in detention for longer periods of time without any hearings, as the courts could not keep up with the rapid growth of the enforcement system.
Along with these historic increases to immigration enforcement funding, the bill would also reshape immigration benefits by imposing mandatory fees for multiple applications. For the first time, the United States would charge people to apply for asylum — with the fee set at an unwaivable $1,000 minimum. This alone would effectively eliminate asylum as an option for unaccompanied children and asylum seekers held in detention who have no money or access to work opportunities. But even asylum applicants outside of detention would struggle to pay these fees, as the bill would mandate that asylum applicants applying for work permits must pay $550 every 6 months to get and keep a work permit, as well as an additional $100 fee every year the application remains pending.
Under this new system, an asylum applicant who had to wait five years to get a decision in our heavily backlogged asylum system would have to pay as much as $7,000 in fees to get a decision; $1,000 for the application, $550 every six months for a work permit, and $500 for the five years the application was pending. And if the decision was negative, the House Judiciary bill would make the person pay $900 to appeal, up from the current $110 fee.
Beyond asylum, the bill would impose exorbitant fees on people applying for humanitarian parole ($1,000) temporary protected status ($500, up from the current $50 fee), and Special Immigrant Juvenile status ($500). Even those seeking to support migrant children would be hit with exorbitant fees. Any person seeking to sponsor a migrant child from a government shelter would have to pay $8,500 up front, $5,000 of which could later be reimbursed if the child attending every court proceeding. This alone would largely prevent children from ever being released from government shelters to sponsors.
The bill also imposes two new penalties, disguised as “fees,” on people facing enforcement actions. Any person who crosses the border and is apprehended by Border Patrol would be charged a $5,000 “fee” (current law allows the government to penalize a person for crossing improperly with a maximum of a $250 fine). Similarly, any person ordered deported for missing a court hearing would be charged a $5,000 “fee.”
Even more outrageously, the bill would charge any person facing deportation in immigration court $100 every time they asked a judge to extend the case to another hearing (a “continuance”), a common occurrence as people seek to find lawyers before proceeding forward with the case. These fees would apply even for people who are locked in ICE detention centers and have no access to money, essentially forcing people to proceed with their cases without any opportunity to get a lawyer because they would have to pay $100 to get more time.
When viewed from 10,000 feet, the House bill represents a fundamental reshaping of American society and due process for immigrants. ICE would become more powerful than every other federal law enforcement agency, allowing for a level of immigration enforcement that has no historical precedent. Meanwhile, asylum would become effectively impossible for all but the people with enough money to jump through the absurd hoops put in place, and defending oneself in immigration court would become extraordinarily difficult for anyone without enough money to pay these news fees. Should Congress eventually pass this funding and give ICE the ability to establish an even more sprawling network of prisons to lock up whoever they deem as undesirable immigrants, it might soon be hard to recognize the United States as the land of freedom we have long claimed to be.