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Are You In Favor Of The One, Big, Beautiful Act?
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- Yes
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- No
- I don't know
- I don't know
President Donald Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Act,” which he signed on Friday, July 4, sets aside $170 billion toward immigration. The package includes more than $30 billion for enforcement, $45 billion for detention centers, and $47 billion for border protection, including a wall between the US and Mexico, among other provisions, according to NPR.
ICE will see an annual budget of more than $30 billion over the next four years, making it one of the most well-funded police agencies on earth.
According to Global Firepower, which tracks international military spending, the US will spend more on immigration enforcement than Israel, the Netherlands, and Brazil spend on their militaries.
ICE Director Todd Lyons called the measure a "real win" for the American people.
"The unprecedented funding for ICE will enable my hard-working officers and agents to continue making America safe again by identifying, arresting, and removing criminal aliens from our communities," he posted on X.
Democrats, who all voted against the spending bill, had a much more dire view of the measure.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it was "one of the saddest days in American history," when the House of Representatives passed the bill 218-214 on Thursday.
Along with increasing the number of ICE agents, the bill increases the number of beds nationwide to hold immigration detainees to "at least" 116,000, the American Immigration Council estimates.
As of Friday, ICE held 55,000 detainees in facilities across the US, according to NBC News.
The US will spend $8 billion to build new “soft-sided” holding centers, structures that can be quickly erected from tents and fences, per the AIC report.
Trump toured one such facility this week in the Florida Everglades, dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz." The center is designed to house up to 3,000 detainees as they await deportation proceedings.
“Everybody we arrest, we need a bed, because they’re going to be in detention from several days to several months, depending on the case,” Border Czar Tom Homan said on "Cuomo." “... So this will give us a little breathing room, give us extra beds so we can target more criminals throughout the country.”
However, the bill only includes a $3.3 billion increase for immigration courts, already snarled in a legal logjam of cases. That allocation “will likely dramatically increase already high immigration court case backlogs, particularly for people held in detention facilities,” the AIC stated.
While the new budget significantly expands ICE’s resources and reach, experts question how quickly the agency can implement its new powers.
“It will absolutely supercharge immigration enforcement over time, but it's not gonna happen overnight,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told NPR. “So how quickly the Trump administration is able to use this money to fuel its mass deportations campaign is a real question.”
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