The Worst Part of Trump's Big Bill Is Getting Almost No Attention [View all]

The Republican budget bill is stuffed with terrible policies, but Democrats have been largely silent on perhaps its most destructive component.

https://newrepublic.com/article/196753/trump-republican-budget-bill-immigration-enforcement

https://archive.ph/WTfoy


Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images

For many weeks now, Senate Democrats have been trying to home in on the right message against the Republicans’ preposterously titled Big Beautiful Bill. While the budget bill narrowly cleared the House after some false starts, its deficit-busting characteristics have thus far kept it from the unified GOP support it needs to clear the Senate. Yet the Democrats similarly are not united on the best strategy to turn the bill into a political loser among voters: The bill is a tax break for the rich. It will kick millions of people off Medicaid and food stamps. It will explode the federal deficit.

All of this is true. But the Democrats have been largely silent on perhaps the bill’s most ominous characteristic: an orgy of resources for Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller’s shock troops to carry out President Trump’s indiscriminate crackdown on immigration and protest. My sense is that Democrats are used to their Republican counterparts (and some within their own ranks) pushing for increased “border security” and immigration enforcement funding during budget negotiations and think the public will view it as old hat. This is a sort of learned defeatism, but it also ignores that we are talking about an entirely different scale here. Taking into account previously allocated funding this fiscal year, we’re looking at some $200 billion in spending on immigration enforcement, far above what’s allocated to any other federal law enforcement function and more than has ever been spent on immigration enforcement.

The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration’s ramp-up of enforcement, detention, and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on. It would take everything we’ve seen so far—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.

Beyond that, the bill furthers the transformation of federal law enforcement toward a focus on immigration enforcement specifically. The Cato Institute estimates that immigration and border funding would equal about eight times the FBI’s entire budget and 36 times more than tax and financial crimes enforcement. That funding disparity is compounded by Trump’s penchant for pulling agents from other functions to the all-encompassing immigration dragnet: For months now, thousands of federal agents who work on everything from child abuse to money laundering have been reassigned to raiding businesses in search of undocumented workers. Meanwhile, ICE is spending so wildly on its crackdown that it may run out of money next month—unless Republicans manage to pass this bill.

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