On July 4, President Trump signed his Big Beautiful Bill into law, granting immigration-border enforcement over $170 billion in funding for the next four years and increasing ICE’s annual budget threefold from $8.7 billion to over $27 billion. This makes ICE the highest funded law enforcement agency in the country; meanwhile, the president has cut funding for federal health care by over $1 trillion, depriving hospitals across the nation of the resources they need to operate efficiently. Trump’s choice to increase funding for immigration enforcement while slashing support for health programs, callously reveals that the administration prioritizes mass deportation over the well-being of American citizens.
By 2029, this budget increase will have allocated $75 billion to ICE to hit Trump’s unrealistic goal of recruiting 10,000 new ICE agents and provide said agents with heavy bonuses. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ICE plans to use $45 billion of their budget to construct and manage new detention facilities, while using the other $30 billion to hire 10,000 new agents. However, the sheer scale of the proposal reduces its feasibility; when Trump attempted this in his first term, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general estimated they would need to interview over half a million people to reach the goal.
Currently, most detention facilities that ICE uses are obtained through contracts with private prison companies that demand a “quota” for the amount of beds filled, pushing for unnecessary incarceration and spending. Moreover, ICE is currently paying for beds, hotel rooms, and facilities that remain nearly empty, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars that could pay for veteran housing, homeless shelters, or healthcare. Trump’s laser focus on deportation leaves these citizen support programs underfunded and unable to fulfill their roles, while ICE remains severely overfunded without utilizing their budget properly.
While ICE benefits from their huge budget increase from the Big Beautiful Bill, budget cuts to health programs such as Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicare leave countless Americans without indispensable medical assistance. With Medicaid alone, the Joint Economic Committee estimates around 17 million Americans will lose health services as a result of this tradeoff. Over 20 million Americans will lose some or all of their SNAP benefits, and even more will be affected by the cuts to Medicare. Now, hospitals that serve patients covered by Medicaid are at risk of shutting down, and those working there are at risk of losing their jobs. The Trump administration has prioritized mass deportation over healthcare, turning a blind eye to millions of Americans.
Trump has also demonized immigrants, claiming that “Immigrants are the enemy within,” and even asserting that “they’re eating the dogs and eating the cats.” These unwarranted, blatant stereotypes portray immigrants as nothing more than criminals. Studies from the National Institute of Justice indicate that the crime rate per 100,000 undocumented immigrants is lower than the crime rate per 100,000 American citizens. Rather than focusing on the crime rate with American citizens, Trump deliberately attacks immigrants to falsely reinforce ICE’s immoral and illogical budget.
The president has also claimed that immigrants take jobs from Americans and evade taxes; however in 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes, exceeding well-known corporations such as Tesla, Netflix, and Bank of America. As for jobs, KelloggInsight found that undocumented immigrants launch more companies, whether large or small, than native-born Americans do. This means those undocumented immigrants are creating more jobs than they are “taking away”. Again, these baseless claims only exist to push a false narrative, attributing all of America’s problems today to immigrants, rather than the nation’s infrastructure as a whole.
Trump has deliberately ignored some of the most important issues in our nation in favor of his mass deportation agenda. Instead of allowing the president to spend bizarre amounts of dollars on an enemy that doesn’t exist, Americans must hold the administration accountable for their ignorance and apathy.
