Washington, DC — On Friday the Senate passed a Trump-backed bill that gives billions more for detention and deportation, including a staggering budget increase of nearly $500 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), bringing the agency to a nearly $10 billion budget. In response, Setareh Ghandehari, Detention Watch Network’s advocacy director, issued the following statement:
“On Friday, Senate Democrats fully co-signed Trump's dangerous and immoral anti-immigrant and anti-democratic agenda. Rather putting up any semblance of a fight to reign in the Trump regime, the Democrats continue to bargain with immigrant lives and have now supercharged Trump’s cruel detention and deportation agenda by passing this funding bill. Make no mistake, this bill will wreak havoc on immigrants, working people, and communities nationwide with unprecedented immigration enforcement.
Immigration enforcement – the targeting, detention, and deportation of people – is fundamentally fraught with inhumane conditions, a lack of accountability and a culture of violence. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agencies carrying out immigration enforcement, are plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence that results in system-wide abuses, including death. The federal government already wastes billions annually on ICE and CBP ($28 billion in Fiscal Year 2024) to profile, jail, and deport immigrants. This bill will skyrocket ICE’s astronomical budget while also slashing vital programs that serve millions of Americans, including housing, healthcare, public infrastructure, and food assistance programs. The bill fails to fund the Emergency Food Program (TEFAP) by $20 million, cuts $2 billion from projects to improve our roads and airports, cuts rent subsidies by more than $700 million, and cuts funding to the National Institute of Health by $280 million – all to enable Trump’s investment in the targeting, surveilling, arresting, detaining, and deporting of people.
Additionally, this bill strips away checks and balances, concentrating power over federal resources and giving the Trump administration, including Musk’s widely criticized DOGE, power to act with impunity. There will be virtually no guardrails – Musk’s free rein to dismantle the federal government will be bolstered.
Without a doubt, this bill is a blank check that will translate into the separation of families, disruption of daily life for communities as a whole, and most alarmingly, abuse and death. Taxpayer dollars earmarked for cruel and harmful immigration enforcement will come at the expense of prioritizing vital programs and services that support the needs of all Americans. At what point are our elected leaders going to push back against Trump’s hate and division, and instead demand funding for critical programs that support everyone’s well-being? Democrats could have done it – they have before. In Fiscal Year 2019 under the first Trump administration, driven by constituent demands, members of Congress blocked $1 billion of funding for ICE.
We need real leaders who aren’t afraid to unite against Trump’s cruel anti-immigrant agenda, who invest in critical programs that support everyone’s well-being, and who advocate for the rights of immigrants – valued and vital members of our communities.”
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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.