Trump’s Budget Bill Would Turbocharge Immigration Tactics That Provoked LA Protests

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided worksites in Los Angeles on June 6, randomly arresting and detaining undocumented and legal immigrants, these new and invasive tactics of immigration enforcement provoked protests. Those protests led President Donald Trump to deploy the military, which a judge found to be illegal on Thursday, to help ICE continue its raids.

But soon, these tactics and the militarized response to the protests they provoked would be turbocharged and deployed in every community in the country if Republicans pass Trump’s budget bill.

The version of the bill passed by the House contains over $150 billion to fund Trump’s immigration enforcement and detention regime. (A Senate version of the bill, by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, would offer much lower DHS funding, though it’s unclear if Paul’s version will prevail in the Senate.) The funding infusion, as envisioned by House Republicans, would double the size of the immigration and border enforcement force, already the largest law enforcement force in the country, and create a detention regime for people not charged with criminal offenses that few countries have seen in recent decades.

This includes $45 billion toward new detention camps — a 13,000% increase in funding that would quadruple detention capacity. ICE’s budget would triple, and it would receive more than $8 billion to hire 10,000 new agents, officers and support staff for enforcement and removal operations — more than doubling its size. Customs and Border Patrol would receive $5 billion for its own detention centers — a 10,000% increase in funding — and $4.1 billion to hire 8,500 new frontline staff.

“There’s just a lot of concern, given the authoritarian nature of the approach of this administration, that giving billions to them without appropriate oversight will spill into other areas, like what we’ve seen in Los Angeles,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.

Trump is currently pushing for immigration enforcement to deport at least 1 million people a year from the U.S. To do so, his administration has diverted resources from every other law enforcement function of the government toward immigration enforcement and engaged in new and brutal tactics to remove as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

These tactics include warrantless worksite raids and community sweeps targeting anyone on the street; arrests at immigration courts of people pursuing a legal process to stay in the country; and false accusations of gang membership to remove people to a concentration-camp-like prison in El Salvador without due process.

It was these tactics that provoked protests in Los Angeles after masked ICE officers jumped out of unmarked vans to sweep up day laborers seeking work outside of two Home Depots and another site. Within one day of the protests breaking out, Trump federalized the California National Guard and deployed Marines to quell the protests under dubious legal authority and over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and the Los Angeles Police Department. The deployment only inflamed the situation further as Trump used the military to help ICE continue its enforcement actions.

The administration’s goal in this deployment was to “liberate” Los Angeles “from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a press conference where FBI officers tackled and handcuffed Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) for asking a question.

But the administration still needs more money if it wants to expand its effort to wage war on Democratic Party-controlled cities and states across the country through immigration enforcement.

“Their ability to do that is only somewhat, but at least somewhat, constrained by what they’re appropriated by Congress,” said Heidi Altman, vice president for policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “But they are banking on the reconciliation bill passing to be able to carry out this authoritarian vision of immigration enforcement on such a scale that I don’t think we can even imagine it right now.”

That is exactly what Republican leaders in Congress are hoping for as they push for the Senate to pass legislation, as the House did in May. The special “budget reconciliation” process Republicans are using will allow them to avoid a Democratic filibuster, meaning they only have to agree among themselves to make the bill become law.

“The riots in Los Angeles this weekend underscore the need for the Senate to pass the one big, beautiful bill,” House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Lisa McClain (Mich.) said, using the GOP name for the legislation that will increase the federal deficit by about $2.4 trillion over a decade. “ICE needs our help. They need more resources to deport and detain violent, illegal aliens.”

“Anybody who watched these just inflammatory scenes roll out in Los Angeles over the weekend,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (La.) said. “See one more example why we need to pass the one big, beautiful bill and why we need to get it to President Trump’s desk as soon as possible.”

Congressional Democrats, on the other hand, remain conflicted on how to approach Trump’s immigration enforcement actions. Some have declined to connect the scenes in Los Angeles to the budget bill, preferring to call the administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement actions and militarized response to protests a distraction, while others have called out Trump’s actions as authoritarian.

“Why is Donald Trump doing this? To divert attention,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor. “He knows that his ‘Big, Ugly Bill’ is highly unpopular with the American people. The more they learn about it, the more they hate it. So, he seeks to divert attention. That’s his M.O.”

The use of the word “distraction” has spread across the Democratic Party to deflect from any Trump action, particularly on immigration, that does not align with the party’s preferred line of attack on the budget bill: health care.

“It’s Medicaid Monday, don’t let Trump distract you from what he is trying to do. Cut millions from Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) posted online on Monday.

Other Democrats are vaguer in their efforts not to talk about the bill’s dramatic immigration enforcement expansion.

“I think the problems in the reconciliation bill are enormous in every respect, and so there are numerous, innumerable reasons to oppose it,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told HuffPost when asked about the bill’s immigration provisions and their relation to ICE’s actions in Los Angeles.

There are also Democrats who are questioning the immigration spending in the bill and its connection to Trump’s increasingly autocratic actions.

“You can throw all the money you want at the problem, but the underlying problem is they’re breaking the law every single day,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told HuffPost. “They could come to Congress and try to fix the law to make it better, but they’re not. They’re just deciding to spend more money to act illegally, and it’s going to destroy this country.”