House Republicans recently passed Trump’s budget reconciliation legislation that massively redistributes income from some of the poorest households to the richest. It is now under consideration in the Senate and Trump is pressuring senators to pass it without major changes. Aside from cutting taxes by trillions for the wealthy, kicking 15 million people off health care, and cutting food aid for the poor, the bill provides an unfathomable amount of additional money to fund Trump’s draconian mass deportation agenda.
In just a few months, Trump’s deportation troops have repeatedly arrested and deported the wrong people, including U.S. citizens; sent innocent people to gulags designed for terrorists in third countries; separated families and turned children into orphans; detained high school honors students; and engaged in countless other heinous actions. The bill provides $155 billion in new immigration enforcement funding—more than five times the amount of current funding—to supercharge the ability of the Trump administration to carry out more actions like these, as well as further militarize the border and build more miles of the border wall, put immigrants in new and expanded prisons, and carry out worksite raids across the country.
Altogether, as Figure A shows, Trump would have $185 billion for immigration enforcement, and this doesn’t include additional appropriations that Congress could pass in future years. Even with all that spending, there isn’t one new cent in the bill that would go to ensuring that wages and working conditions are protected by increasing funding to the federal agencies that hold lawbreaking employers accountable. In fact, the $185 billion Trump could have at his disposal to carry out his radical immigration enforcement agenda would be 80 times more than the annual government funding for labor standards enforcement. That disparity alone tells you all you need to know about how little the Trump administration prioritizes working people.
House Republican budget bill would give Trump $185 billion for immigration enforcement—80 times more than for protecting labor standards: U.S. government funds appropriated for immigration enforcement in fiscal year 2025, and projected under House budget legislation, compared with all annual labor standards enforcement funding (in billions)
| 2025 current funding | New funding via reconciliation | New funding via reconciliation | New funding via reconciliation | New funding via reconciliation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Immigration enforcement | $30.1 | $83.2 | $45 | $27 | $0 |
| Labor standards enforcement | $2.3 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
Notes: The total for 2025 existing funding for immigration enforcement, not including new funds via reconciliation, includes funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management, all of which are in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Notes: The total for 2025 existing funding for immigration enforcement, not including new funds via reconciliation, includes funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Biometric Identity Management, all of which are in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Totals for labor standards enforcement are for fiscal year 2023, adjusted for inflation to 2025 dollars using the CPI-U, and include appropriations for all subagencies, administrations, and offices of the U.S. Department of Labor considered for “worker protection” in budget documents, including the Employee Benefits Security Administration, Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, Wage and Hour Division, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Office of Labor–Management Standards, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the Office of the Solicitor, in addition to two other agencies not within the Department of Labor: the National Labor Relations Board and the National Mediation Board.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Fiscal Year 2025—Department of Labor, Budget in Brief; National Mediation Board, Congressional Justifications, fiscal year 2024; National Labor Relations Board, Performance Budget Justification, fiscal year 2025; and U.S. Department of Homeland Security budget data are from William L. Painter, Comparing DHS Component Funding, FY2025: In Brief, Congressional Research Service, R48115, updated May 12, 2025; and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Congressional Budget Justification Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, section on Management Directorate, n.d; H.R.1 – One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 119th Congress (2025-2026). American Immigration Council, “Rapid Response Analysis: U.S. House of Representatives 2025 ‘Reconciliation’ Spending Provisions Related to Immigration and the Border,” Fact Sheet, May 2025; Adam Isacson, “$160 Billion to Detain and Deport: Congress’s ‘Reconciliation’ Bill is a Betrayal of Priorities and Will Harm the Most Vulnerable,” Features, Washington Office on Latin America, May 22, 2025.
Let’s take stock of this new funding that would help Trump turn the country into an authoritarian police state. First, the reconciliation bill provides $27 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and operations. This would nearly triple the agency’s funding and make ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the entire federal government.
Giving ICE more funding than any other law enforcement agency to violate due process at an even grander scale won’t help anyone, however, because deportations don’t improve workers’ wages and working conditions. It’ll unquestionably make workplace conditions worse, while giving ICE the ability to do much more of what they’ve already been doing—namely, covering their faces and kidnapping students who are in the country lawfully, as well as going after labor organizers, university scientists, and even sometimes construction workers who are U.S. citizens.
The bill also provides $45 billion to spend on new and expanded immigrant detention centers through September 30, 2029, nearly quadrupling ICE’s detention budget on an annualized basis. As one analyst recently pointed out, the federal Bureau of Prisons currently has an annual budget of $8.3 billion, so ICE’s annual budget for immigrant detention would be nearly 50% larger than that of the entire federal prison system.
And then there’s $83.2 billion in new funds for border enforcement and construction of Trump’s border wall. That includes $8.3 billion for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, vehicles, and facilities, $6.3 billion for border surveillance technology and vetting, and $51.6 billion for border wall construction. Another $5 billion would go to the Department of Defense (DOD) for so-called “border operations,” meaning the deployment of military personnel and the temporary detention of immigrants on DOD installations. And right before the bill passed, an additional $12 billion was added to reimburse states for money they’ve spent on border enforcement (most of which would likely go to Texas to reimburse the state government for things like barriers and razor wire they installed in the Rio Grande).
In addition to mind-blowing levels of new government spending for detaining, deporting, and terrorizing immigrants, House Republicans also included punitive new taxes and fees on immigrants. They added a 3.5% fee on remittances (money sent abroad) paid by people who are not U.S. citizens, which would also turn staff at places like Western Union into de facto immigration enforcement officials because they would have to check their customers’ immigration statuses. House Republicans also voted to impose exorbitant fees on applications that immigrants file with the U.S. government. For example, people seeking relief in immigration court would be charged hundreds of dollars in new fees, and people who are the subject of immigration enforcement actions would be charged thousands.
Those seeking asylum, who currently do not have to pay a fee to apply for humanitarian protection, would be required to pay a new $1,000 filing fee. The ultimate result is that asylum protections would all but disappear for children and people in detention who can’t work. Those not in detention would have to pay a new $550 fee every six months for their work permits—and people with parole and Temporary Protected Status would have to pay this new fee, too. A new $8,500 up-front fee for sponsors of migrant children would mean that the vast majority of children in government shelters might end up detained for lengthy periods. These are just a few examples from a long list.
And finally, the bill neither improves the immigration system nor helps workers. The bill only spends $1.25 billion on the immigration court system. Investments in judges and staff would speed up adjudications on benefits and deportations and make the immigration process fairer and timelier relative to the status quo, where people with legitimate claims are left in limbo for many years about whether or not they can remain lawfully in the United States. This is a drop in the bucket compared with what’s needed.
And despite the Trump administration’s many claims that they want to help U.S. workers, the Republican budget bill provides exactly zero new dollars to federal agencies that protect workers—even though these agencies’ funding has been flat or declining for decades while workers are being hurt, killed, and robbed on the job at alarming rates. It spends zero on agencies that check if workplaces are safe. It spends zero to fight illegal child labor. And it spends zero dollars on the agency that enforces safety and health rules for people who work in mines. To add insult to injury, the Trump administration is working hard to reduce staff at those agencies and firing their leadership, as well. The senators who vote in favor of taking this bill one step closer to becoming law will be turning their backs on workers while plunging the United States into a dark new era of authoritarianism, extreme and intrusive surveillance, and a new national network of internment camps.
