President Donald Trump signed a sprawling budget bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — into law last week. The legislation, a vehicle for most of his domestic policy agenda, rewrites significant portions of the country’s immigration and criminal justice systems in ways big and small.
The most visible shift is the law’s commitment of about $170 billion to immigration enforcement over the next decade. That includes a 265% annual increase to the national immigration detention budget, according to the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group. The administration plans to rapidly double immigration detention space to hold about 100,000 people, largely by paying private prison companies to reopen currently shuttered facilities.
A less publicized provision of the law offloads some of the costs of immigration enforcement directly onto immigrants. The law includes new or increased fees for Temporary Protected Status, asylum claims, work permits, appeals and visas, and new fines for deportations and apprehensions. The Wall Street Journal estimates the fees will raise well over $1 billion in revenue over the next decade.
That cost burden will likely deter some eligible people from seeking legal protections in the U.S. “Some people may not be able to get temporary protective status and take advantage of some of these provisions because people can’t afford it, or because people are nervous they can’t afford it,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning non-partisan think tank.
Another way the law changes immigration enforcement is by setting aside about $15 billion in grants to state and local governments for immigration enforcement. In theory, all these funds from the law are to be disbursed over 5–10 years. But David J. Bier, a policy scholar with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, wrote that a lot of the spending is likely to be front-loaded. “It is even plausible that they could blow through this money by next year and demand more from Congress,” Bier concluded.
For a sense of scale, $15 billion is about three times the roughly $5 billion that the federal government provides in grants to state and local police in a typical year, according to a Marshall Project review of federal spending documents.
At the same time, the law authorizes the attorney general to withhold certain grants from jurisdictions that limit information-sharing with federal immigration authorities, a provision that is likely to be wielded against sanctuary cities. Because compliance is defined “as determined by the Attorney General,” the law creates a broad and variable standard that allows for political appointees to decide unilaterally which jurisdictions are in violation.
You can read the full article at The Marshall Project.