How the GOP Megabill Would Turbocharge Local Immigration Enforcement

$171 billion: That’s the gigantic amount that the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the package designed to advance President Trump’s agenda that Congress adopted on Thursday, would pour into federal immigration enforcement, according to researchers at the American Immigration Council.

The bill would massively scale up immigration detention facilities to the tune of $45 billion over five years, help recruit thousands of new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and devote $47 billion to building a border wall, more than three times what the first Trump administration spent on the wall, plus billions more for conducting operations at the border—all on top of funds that Congress has already appropriated to ICE and other federal agencies.

And it would rain money—at least $14 billion—on local law enforcement departments to incentivize them to partner with federal authorities and serve as a force multiplier for ICE. 

Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, says this money would pull police and sheriffs even deeper into the work of enforcing federal immigration laws. They’ll be cajoled into more patrols at the border and help identify, arrest, and detain more immigrants, even though immigration violations are not criminal offenses. 

In particular, the funding is meant to expand the federal 287(g) program, through which ICE authorizes some sheriff’s deputies in participating counties to act as its surrogate agents. The Trump administration this year extended the program to cover encounters that deputies may have during regular patrols—as opposed to just interactions within county jails. 

Even jurisdictions that cast themselves as friendly to immigrants’ rights may feel the pull of this money, Orozco says, let alone the myriad immigration hardliners who lead local agencies. Bolts reported earlier this year how California’s Alameda County, one of the nation’s most liberal counties with explicit sanctuary protections in place, still shares sensitive data with ICE in exchange for federal money. This is a widespread dynamic that Orozco suspects will explode further given the amounts at play. He said, “This money is going to ingrain immigration enforcement in all aspects of local law enforcement.”

Bolts talked to Orozco on Tuesday to understand how this megabill would magnify enforcement, the various programs and initiatives it would fund, and who stands to benefit. 

The Senate passed its version of the bill on Tuesday, and the House passed the same package on Thursday, sending it to the president’s desk. Trump is expected to sign it on July 4. (The article has been updated to reflect the final passage of the bill through the House.)

The bill devotes billions to Trump’s immigration agenda. How do you expect this large sum will transform the landscape of immigration enforcement? 

The vast majority of this funding is focused on punitive immigration enforcement. 

There’s $45 billion for ICE detention. From what we’ve calculated, it’s going to more than double immigration detention: We calculated this is going to fund about 116,000 beds [for ICE detainees]; right now, there are about 50,000 beds, though plenty of detention centers are overcrowded and ICE is pushing the limits of its detention centers’ capacity. 

And the Senate bill has nearly $30 billion to support ICE’s immigration enforcement efforts, and part of that money is to be used for additional personnel. Based on the breakdown laid out in the [original] House bill, they are looking to hire 10,000 new ICE officers. [Editor’s note: Right now, ICE has approximately 20,000 employees, of which roughly 6,000 are deportation agents.] So we’re going to see more arrests in the community. One of the main goals for this administration is to cause fear and confusion for the immigrant community—they’re really pushing for people to decide to self-deport, so they want people to feel insecure. 

On this surge in detention, who is set to manage this? Are we talking about local jails and state prisons, or about federal authorities opening up facilities directly?

A bit of both. One of the pots of money—$3.5 billion to compensate states for locating and apprehending noncitizens—covers the temporary detention of noncitizens. Recently we heard of Alligator Alcatraz, a new detention center in Florida that’s going to be a soft-sided facility with tents; the goal is to have a capacity of 5,000 individuals. We might see more such facilities spring up. [Editor’s note: That detention center was set up with the active involvement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. On Tuesday, hours after the Senate passed the reconciliation package, Trump adviser Stephen Miller said during a Fox News segment on the detention camp that more governors ought to “call DHS, work with us to build facilities in your state.”]

But the likelihood is that they’d be built by private contractors or operated by private contractors.

Right now, 90 percent of people who are in immigration detention are in a facility that’s operated by a private detention corporation. GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two main corporations that are part of this process, and we’ve heard from their earnings calls that they’re very excited about getting more money and to expand detention. 

This Senate package only provides vague instructions on how federal immigration agencies should be spending these billions. So who has the power to decide here, and what are the oversight mechanisms?

The Senate bill, in contrast to the House bill, which provided funding for specific things, provides so much discretion: It gives agencies flexibility to determine how to spend the money—how much they want to use to provide for new agents, to expand expedited removal. It has less guardrails around what the money is going to be used for.

And there’s a bigger problem: There’s no reporting requirement to Congress, no oversight mechanism. And the Trump administration earlier this year gutted oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security—the civil rights and civil liberties office, the office of immigrant detention ombudsman. Those didn’t have much teeth, but they were key to be able to submit complaints about civil rights violations or issues in immigration detention. But now those agencies have been whittled down. In fact, Republicans through the appropriations process want to go further and eliminate the immigrant detention ombudsman office completely. 

So oversight mechanisms are being whittled away—at the same time that the reconciliation process is giving billions of dollars through these broad instructions. 

In the past, local law enforcement has been a force multiplier for ICE—the agency is big, but not so big as to carry out an agenda like Trump’s on its own. Will that change given the massive amount of money devoted to increasing ICE operations?

ICE fundamentally has to rely on local law enforcement to be able to meet the numbers that it wants to meet. It’s less costly and much more safe for ICE agents to be able to arrest individuals who are picked up during local law enforcement actions, and then show up in jails. You’re seeing now how difficult it could be for immigration arrests on the street, especially when you have so many protesters who are upset about the way that these arrests are being carried out, and so ICE relies on local law enforcement. There wouldn’t be a reality that I would see where ICE would choose a different way of arresting individuals.

So how will this bill and its billions of dollars affect local law enforcement? What should we be watching in terms of how this transforms local policing and sheriffs?

This bill includes a lot of money to fund state and local governments and their collaboration with ICE. There’s at least $14 billion that will go towards that. It’s likely higher, but some of the other funds in the Senate bill for this purpose are in larger pots of money, and there isn’t a way to identify what portion would go directly toward state and local collaboration.

Let’s start off with 287(g) agreements, which are agreements where ICE deputizes local law enforcement to carry out some of their duties. Since 2012, most of those agreements have been limited to jails; the Trump administration revived the ‘task force model,’ which had been suspended in 2012 over civil rights concerns, which allows deputized local officers to arrest people for immigration-related issues during the regular course of their work, so when they’re on the streets. 

Since the [second] Trump administration started, 287(g) agreements have expanded dramatically—from about 135 agreements [largely between ICE and individual counties] to over 740 agreements. 

That’s going to expand. The House bill had $650 million that was targeted just for 287(g), for the purpose of facilitating counties joining these agreements; for comparison, the previous funding level for 287(g) agreements was around $24 million. In the Senate bill, 287(g) agreements are an allowable expense in the funds sent to ICE. 

287(g) requires training, resources by local law enforcement agencies, and detention space, and many sheriff’s offices are struggling financially. I used to live in North Carolina, and in Pender County this year, the county commission wanted to force the sheriff to enter into a 287(g) agreement. The sheriff [Alan Cutler] pushed back, not because of some immigrants’ rights or humanistic perspective, but because he just wasn’t receiving funding to do it. Now we’re going to see an explosion of new agreements; there’s an investment in this bill to reimburse local and state governments for their participation in federal immigration efforts.

What about programs other than 287(g)?

There are other pots of money. There’s $10 billion for state-funded border barriers—think of Texas with the buoys that they put on the Rio Grande, that could be a potential expense. In addition to that, there’s about $450 million for Operation Stonegarden, a program that allows states and localities to hire new officers to support CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] and its border missions.

And what this bill also does is it attaches strings to new law enforcement grants. [Editor’s note: One of these funds is an expansion of Byrne-JAG grants, a program with which the federal government assists local law enforcement fight crime.] In order to get these grants, states and local governments would have to ensure that they don’t have policies that limit cooperation with ICE: Only agencies that meet the DOJ’s standards would get this funding. 

What that could mean is that, if there’s a local government struggling to finance law enforcement, they may decide to get rid of welcoming or sanctuary policies to get some of the funding that’s opened up through this bill.

Are there decisions by local and state officials that could slow down the goals of this bill, or is this surge of federal spending set to overwhelm those decisions?

You can’t really prevent federal law enforcement from coming into cities. But you can prevent local law enforcement from using resources for collaboration and limit the type of information that’s being shared between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement. 

You can say that local law enforcement can’t enter into 287(g) agreements. But we’ve also seen the converse: Georgia and Florida require local agencies to request to be part of agreements with ICE. [Editor’s note: Florida earlier this year passed a law that threatens elected local officials with punishment and removal if they fail to cooperate with ICE.]

In addition, states can limit the types of detention centers within their boundaries. We’ve seen Illinois and other states prevent counties from entering into private contracts with CoreCivic or GEO Group, so then those private corporations cannot contract with ICE to hold and detain individuals. 

The funds in this bill must be spent by 2029—then what? You’re describing a massive increase in the money that’ll go to detaining people and boosting local law enforcement, so that would create a big cliff at that time.

This money is going to ingrain immigration enforcement in all aspects of local law enforcement. 

If you bring in detention centers to a community, this is the issue: They make the economies dependent on those detention centers. I used to live in New Mexico, where the Cibola Detention Center used to be a prison, and it was closed down by the Bureau of Prisons [in 2016] because of a history of abuses. But six months later, it was reopened as an immigrant detention center. 

I was talking to a guard at the immigration detention center—I used to practice there—and he said he was happy it had reopened because he had worked there when it was under the Bureau of Prisons and he’d been at risk of losing his retirement when the prison closed down. That’s what happens with prisons generally: Rural communities become very dependent on them. If you get rid of a detention center, you have to change the local economies. [Editor’s note: New Mexico’s state House passed a bill to close migrant detention centers this spring, but the Senate did not pick it up.]

What we’ll probably see moving forward is the government finding ways to continue to fund this huge network of detention centers and law enforcement agencies collaborating together. 

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.