To add insult to injury, congressional Republicans also failed to listen to Americans’ overwhelming rejection of President Trump’s ballroom project and planned to leave American taxpayers on the hook for $1 billion toward its security costs as part of their funding package. Despite claims by the Trump administration that the ballroom would be completely privately funded, a Fox News headline stated, “Republicans sneak in taxpayer cash for Trump’s ballroom project.” Senate Republicans’ legislative text regarding the ballroom security funding was found to have violated Senate budget reconciliation rules, and Senate Republicans are divided as they explore how to revise the language in the bill amidst President Trump’s push for the funding.
There is no credible border security or national security justification for congressional Republicans using partisan budget reconciliation to give the Trump administration’s CBP and ICE another blank check. The Trump administration’s ICE and CBP retain more than $103 billion in unobligated, unaccountable funds from congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) mass deportation slush fund as of the end of March, according to the Senate Budget Committee minority.
This new windfall for ICE and CBP to deploy on America’s streets without sufficient safeguards could instead be used to help Americans weather the painful economic conditions the Trump administration has imposed on the country due to the president’s reckless war of choice in Iran, unprecedented tariffs, and other misguided economic policies. However, congressional Republicans voted down multiple amendments to address Americans’ cost-of-living increases before adopting the budget resolution that lays the groundwork for funding ICE and CBP via a blank check. While Senate Republicans have been compelled to modify some sections of legislative text to comply with the budget reconciliation process, the funding package still allows for a massive, unaccountable fund for reckless immigration enforcement by the Trump administration.
Not only will nearly $70 billion in new, unaccountable DHS, ICE, and CBP funding be layered on top of the Trump administration’s existing OBBBA slush fund, but congressional Republicans have also failed to stop the administration from co-opting the rest of federal law enforcement to assist in mass deportations instead of pursuing their national security and public safety missions. Thousands of federal law enforcement agents have been diverted to support mass deportations, and federal drug prosecutions have fallen while criminal cases are dropped and federal law enforcement resources are used to target President Trump’s political enemies. The Trump administration’s indiscriminate immigration raids have swept up grandmothers, permanent residents, and DACA recipients, and the administration is detaining children in unsafe conditions for extended periods of time and trying to acquire warehouses around the country to detain tens of thousands of people.
American communities are living with the chaotic consequences of the Trump administration’s reckless immigration policies. Instead of putting a halt to these ill-advised actions, congressional Republicans seek to issue another multibillion-dollar taxpayer-funded blank check—one that will not make American communities safer—on top of the OBBBA.
Harmful consequences of congressional Republicans’ blank checks to the Trump administration’s ICE and CBP without guardrails
The killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in the midst of the Trump administration’s reckless immigration enforcement efforts shocked the American public. These deaths were the culmination of a series of actions that brought chaos and fear, not safety, and they follow a pattern of dangerous tactics by an administration that has sought to intimidate people through its immigration enforcement operations. These tactics, enacted across the country, include the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles and the use of tear gas against protesters in Illinois.
The Trump administration’s escalatory immigration enforcement efforts have not made Americans safer, and the tens of billions in new funding that congressional Republicans plan to deliver to ICE and CBP without guardrails will not effectively address public safety needs. Instead, this funding will amplify ICE and CBP’s capacity to carry out the Trump administration’s cruel mass deportation actions unchecked and will result in further operations that endanger the safety and security of American communities.
New blank checks with no accountability for the Trump administration’s ICE and CBP while federal law enforcement is diverted from its public safety mission to support mass deportations
Lawmakers who are serious about countering actual threats to public safety should ensure that resources for federal law enforcement agencies are used to enhance safety and the rule of law, rather than allowing these agencies to operate without accountability or be weaponized by the Trump administration. Budgets passed by Congress should require accountability so that the dangerous immigration enforcement actions Americans have witnessed from the Trump administration cannot happen again.
Instead of accountability, congressional Republicans’ funding package gives ICE and CBP another blank check with no oversight over these agencies’ reckless actions. The funding in congressional Republicans’ proposed reconciliation funding package is layered on top of the existing budgets of other federal law enforcement agencies from which the Trump administration has moved officials away from their national security and public safety responsibilities to assist its unpopular mass deportation agenda. The funding package places no limits on the Trump administration moving federal law enforcement officials who do not work for ICE and CBP away from their designated mission of fighting crime and safeguarding national security in order to participate in mass deportation operations.
The Trump administration has already diverted thousands of law enforcement officials at multiple agencies away from their work tackling serious crime and national security investigations to focus on immigration, which does not make the country safer. For example, in October 2025, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data revealed that nearly a quarter of FBI agents were working on immigration at least 50 percent of their time. This diversion of vital investigative resources, which affected about 3,000 agents, means that these law enforcement officials have had less time to focus on complex cases related to cybercrime, drug trafficking, and terrorism, which could put American communities at greater risk of harm from these crimes.
In addition to this reprioritization of FBI law enforcement personnel and activities, as of September 2025, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had shifted nearly half of its agents, or more than 2,100 people, to assist with deportation operations. This redirection has pulled these law enforcement officials away from carrying out their agency’s mission of bringing to justice criminals who violate drug laws and cause violence in American communities, and instead has forced them to focus on supporting operations to conduct mass deportations of immigrants, the vast majority of whom have no criminal record. As the administration has moved federal law enforcement officials to focus on mass deportations rather than their intended missions, federal drug prosecutions have fallen to their lowest level since at least the late 1990s. Diverting law enforcement resources to mass deportations has made American communities less safe.
Despite these actions by the administration, congressional Republicans are pushing ahead with a huge new infusion of funding for ICE and CBP to continue reckless immigration enforcement tactics. At the same time, these proposals do not include any oversight measures to hold ICE and CBP accountable for their dangerous activities. Proponents of the proposals have rejected attempts to prevent the Trump administration from taking federal law enforcement officials away from the national security cases they usually work on to instead function as an arm of ICE. These legislative priorities reveal how Republicans in Congress are choosing to further bolster the Trump administration’s indiscriminate deportation agenda at the expense of creating guardrails that will protect Americans’ safety.
DOJ gets 2 percent of the funding CBP and ICE will receive, no checks on weaponization
Beyond pushing an accountability-free infusion of cash into CBP and ICE, in an unpersuasive attempt to buttress their funding package’s supposed focus on national security and public safety, congressional Republicans have included just under $1.5 billion for the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. This amount is equal to only about 2 percent of the total funds that the funding proposal includes for DHS, CBP, and ICE (just under $1.5 billion for the DOJ versus almost $70 billion to DHS, CBP, and ICE).
The text of the funding package lists a wide array of functions that the DOJ funds could be used for, including to enforce drug laws, investigate and prosecute terrorism, and other functions. However, congressional Republicans failed to add any prohibition on the attorney general using these funds to target President Trump’s political enemies. They also failed to include any guardrails to prevent these funds from being diverted to support mass deportations. It would seem that if counterterrorism and national security were a greater priority for congressional Republicans than mass deportations, much more funding would go to assisting the DOJ’s mission in these areas rather than the creation of an additional enormous slush fund to support the Trump administration’s indiscriminate immigration enforcement activities.
Taxpayer dollars fund the Trump administration’s indiscriminate immigration enforcement, ensnaring grandmothers, DACA recipients, military families, and children
Billions in funding with no guardrails for ICE and CBP fueled by the OBBBA turbocharged the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, which remains unchecked until Congress acts to require guardrails. A recent analysis by Politico found that in more than 10,000 cases, federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration’s ICE detention practices. Reckless and overzealous immigration enforcement actions with misaligned priorities have led to devastating consequences for people and communities across the United States without strengthening public safety and national security. Individuals who are not public safety threats and have deep ties to their communities have been indiscriminately targeted under this administration. The administration’s immigration enforcement practices have had a devastating impact on children: A recent study estimated that approximately 145,000 U.S. citizen children have experienced family separation as a result of a parent being detained.
Congressional Republicans are again choosing to inject tens of billions more in funds, once again without necessary guardrails, into agencies that have a clear track record of operating aggressively and with impunity, which will not make Americans safer. Immigrants from all walks of life, from grandmothers, military family members, and recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to vulnerable refugees and children, have been swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet. The nearly five-month-long detention of a Missouri grandmother—a green card holder and wife of a U.S. military veteran who has lived in the United States for nearly half a century—for writing two small bad checks, one of them for $25 more than a decade ago, underscores the aggressiveness of this administration’s indiscriminate immigration actions. In the past, this grandmother would have likely appropriately received prosecutorial discretion from DHS given that she was a longtime resident and only had minor offenses, but that is not the case under this administration. Instead, she was held in unacceptable conditions, twice in an isolation cell, and released only after a judge stopped her removal proceedings.
Similarly, a disturbing video of another green card holder in Massachusetts, who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, reveals how she was violently detained along with her two U.S. citizen children in front of a courthouse. A lawsuit alleges that ICE agents surrounded her car, smashed her window, threw her on the ground, and forcibly removed her terrified autistic 13-year-old from the car and threatened him with arrest. The family’s saga ended only when local police intervened and insisted on checking her identification. Even family members of military service members who would have routinely received prosecutorial discretion have been targeted by this administration. A 53-year-old Texas courtroom interpreter, who has lived in the United States for more than three decades and has four adult U.S. citizen children—one of whom just joined the U.S. Army—was detained at an airport while traveling for work. In 2000, she was granted withholding of removal, which protects her from removal to her home country and allows her to work legally in the United States. According to the American Translators Association, she dedicated her life to the legal system and “is the only licensed court interpreter in the state of Texas for Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.” However, under this administration, her long-standing ties and being a parent of an American soldier have not prevented her from being a target. As of April 2026, she remains in a detention center in conditions she describes as a “storage facility for humans,” which she shares with around 100 other women. Her lawyers fear that she will be deported to a third country.
In another example of family members of U.S. military service members being detained by ICE, the wife of an active-duty Army sergeant was detained by ICE during an appointment at an immigration office despite having legal protections under the Convention Against Torture, a U.N. treaty ratified by the United States, which protects her from deportation to her home country of El Salvador. Her husband, who has served in the U.S. Army for 27 years, including in Afghanistan, said, “ICE is out of control right now, sir, taking away rights, as soldiers, that we have.” As of April 2026, she remains in an ICE detention center in El Paso, and her husband shared that he fears that she could be deported to Mexico, where she has no ties. Similarly, a newly married wife of a U.S. Army staff sergeant, who was preparing to train for deployment, was detained at a Louisiana military base when she came to activate her military spouse benefits. In 2005, when she was just 22 months old, a removal order was issued in absentia because her family missed their immigration court hearing. The New York Times reported that she has no criminal history and was a biochemistry student. Reports indicate that she was released with an ankle monitor as an alternative to detention only after The New York Times story that covered her ordeal spread online.
In other examples of indiscriminate enforcement and cruelty, even individuals who are supposed to have stronger legal protections from detention and deportation, such as refugees and DACA recipients, have been targeted for enforcement actions. In upstate New York, a nearly blind 56-year-old Rohingya refugee, “who spoke no English and had mental health issues,” died days after he was dropped off by Border Patrol agents outside a closed coffee shop in frigid weather far from his community area. Local authorities have ruled his death as a homicide, stating that he died as a result of complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration.
DACA recipients under the Trump administration have been detained and even deported in growing numbers. For example, a DACA recipient who was awaiting his DACA renewal was detained on his way to the hospital in Texas to deliver milk to his premature 12-day-old daughter. He is a medical laboratory scientist who worked on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic, with reports indicating that he has no criminal history, an active DACA grant, and a valid work permit. Yet he remains detained, as of April 2026. According to DHS, hundreds of DACA recipients have been arrested and deported in less than a year under the Trump administration.
There are many more examples of indiscriminate enforcement actions like these from the Trump administration, and each tells a story of lack of commonsense prosecutorial discretion, needless family separation, abuse of power, and dashed hopes and dreams. Americans are witnessing example after example of people caught in the Trump administration’s dragnet who simply fail to meet any definition of the “worst of the worst”—a mantra that this administration uses as reasoning for its unprecedented immigration enforcement escalations.
Giving ICE and CBP another blank check with tens of billions of dollars to continue their uncontrolled operations is the opposite of what Americans want from this administration—safety and security, not chaos and inhumanity.
Rapid expansion of unsafe detention centers and a rise in deaths in ICE custody
In addition to large-scale indiscriminate immigration enforcement actions, the Trump administration has significantly expanded ICE detention capacity with plans to massively grow its capacity to detain people to fulfill its mass deportation agenda. Pursuing this agenda has already had deadly consequences with more than 40 people having died in immigration detention since the inception of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, the highest recorded death toll in such a brief time period.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has moved to purchase warehouses and convert them into large-scale “mega” immigration detention centers using funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Internal ICE planning documents released in February 2026 outline a $38.3 billion proposal to build a nationwide network of facilities capable of holding tens of thousands of immigrants. These large-scale detention centers would significantly expand the government’s capacity to detain immigrants under inhumane and abusive conditions. The plan includes eight massive detention centers for 7,000 to 10,000 people each and 16 regional processing centers for shorter-term detention. ICE has already purchased warehouses throughout the country to turn into large detention and processing centers, raising significant concerns from local communities. These warehouses are not meant or equipped to hold people and will require extensive and expensive renovation, including diverting resources like water and sewage infrastructure from local communities to operate as detention facilities. In Social Circle, Georgia, a town of roughly 5,000 people, a plan to convert an industrial warehouse into an ICE detention facility to hold up to 10,000 people alarmed residents worried about its scale and the strain on local infrastructure, and the town is seeking to block this facility. This same story is repeating elsewhere. Communities in Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have pushed back strongly against the Trump administration’s plan to warehouse thousands of people in their towns without any legitimate public safety rationale.
While the Trump administration boasts about targeting criminals and the “worst of the worst,” of the 60,311 people currently in ICE detention as of April 2026, 70.8 percent of detainees have no criminal conviction. This rapid explosion of detention, largely involving people without convictions, comes amid long-standing concerns that detention centers have been plagued by unsanitary conditions, severe overcrowding, and documented abuse. Furthermore, reports have revealed inadequate medical care in ICE detention, especially after the Trump administration stopped paying third-party medical providers that provide medical care to people in detention centers. Children have been needlessly subject to these conditions for extended periods of time. A ProPublica report highlighted the stories of children in the Dilley Detention Center in Texas, and found that about 300 children in Dilley were there for more than a month. In Dilley, families described receiving food with worms and mold, tainted water, and inadequate education. Conditions are so harsh that a 13-year-old Colombian girl who was being treated for anxiety and depression before being detained experienced a worsening of her mental health as a result of the conditions in ICE detention and attempted suicide in custody. The AP reports that, at times, staff withheld her medication. After her suicide attempt, she and her family were put in isolation without seeing a doctor, according to her mother.
The abuse reported by ProPublica and described by families is part of systemic overcrowding and unsafe conditions in ICE facilities nationwide, which will only be exacerbated as the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda continues unchecked, fueled further with a multiyear blank check from congressional Republicans with no conditions attached.
In a recent congressional oversight visit to the Mesa ICE holding facility in Arizona, Democratic congressional members described people packed “like sardines” in a holding cell. They described rooms having no beds or blankets and people lying on the floor, with some pleading for basic hygiene products and medical attention. In Texas, the Camp East Montana detention center was unfinished when it first opened, and an inspection found that it had violated 60 federal standards for immigration detention that seem to originate from fast-tracked construction and early opening. The violations included lack of medical access; basic procedures for keeping guards and people in detention safe; and no way for detainees to contact their families and lawyers. The ACLU and other nongovernmental groups documented the abuse detained immigrants face in Camp East Montana, including a teenager who suffered a broken tooth and damage to his ear that left him with hearing trouble after guards beat him up. Troubling incidents have occurred in other detention centers as well. In Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” when individuals in the facility raised concerns about nonworking phones, guards in the detention center reportedly began to beat and pepper-spray individuals, and one detainee suffered a broken wrist as a result of the altercation.
These examples are not isolated incidents: The Washington Post found that from January 2024 to February 2026, staff members at ICE detention facilities used physical force or chemical agents at least 780 times on detainees. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year for immigrant deaths in custody in two decades. In the first four months of 2026 alone, there have already been 18 reported deaths, or one death every 6.5 days. In the Camp East Montana facility, in January alone there have been three deaths, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death was ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner. ICE initially reported his death as an attempted suicide. However, an autopsy conducted by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office later determined the cause of death to be homicide due to asphyxia. ICE subsequently reported his death was a result of “spontaneous use of force,” but according to a witness, Lunas Campos begged for his medication for hours and began to kick his cell door to get the staff’s attention. Four guards then reportedly dragged him out of his cell, beat and restrained him, then piled on top of him. Following the death of Victor Manuel Diaz, a 36-year-old held at Camp East Montana—who died of “a presumed suicide,” according to ICE—the agency transferred his body to the William Beaumont Army Medical Center, rather than to the county medical examiner who had earlier concluded that the Lunas Campos death was a homicide, raising concerns about the accountability and transparency of the investigation. The lack of accountability and transparency in ICE detention has been further exacerbated by the Trump administration’s closure of the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman at DHS, which Congress put in place to investigate misconduct in the immigration detention system. The closure of this detention oversight body by the Trump administration further weakens oversight of deaths and inhumane treatment of detainees in federal government custody at a time when such oversight is needed more than ever.
The Trump administration has used the OBBBA’s ICE slush fund to facilitate the rapid expansion of detention, including plans to use warehouses around the country to hold tens of thousands of people. Widespread documented reports of inhumane and abusive conditions alongside rising deaths in ICE custody underscore how harmful this expansion of ICE detention funding under the Trump administration has already been. Pumping tens of billions of dollars into ICE for the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans under the current conditions without anything to check overreach, as congressional Republicans are aiming to do, will exacerbate these harms, massively expanding a detention system that is already unsafe and unaccountable.
Conclusion
The Trump administration came into office promising to lower Americans’ costs and keep the country safe. Instead, the administration’s policies have raised Americans’ costs and made the U.S. less secure via unwise tariff policies, a dangerous war of choice, and a mass deportation agenda that has resulted in national security and public safety being sidelined in favor of an ideological crusade against immigration that has weakened the country.
As Americans reckon with the needless deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good on city streets, veterans’ families detained, a spike in the number of people dying in ICE custody, and ICE’s plan to warehouse tens of thousands of people across the country for mass deportations, Congress should step up to halt the Trump administration’s cruel and damaging tactics. Instead, congressional Republicans are poised to rubber-stamp the Trump administration’s mass deportation expansion plan with yet another multiyear, multibillion-dollar blank check to ICE and CBP with no guardrails while everyday Americans struggling to make ends meet receive no relief. Congressional Republicans’ funding bill puts the administration’s unpopular mass deportation agenda and President Trump’s ballroom first, instead of enhancing Americans’ safety and security at a time of war, rising prices, and global instability caused by President Trump’s ill-considered choices.