WASHINGTON — Congress is preparing to hand the agencies that hunt and remove immigrants enough money to keep doing it until Donald Trump leaves office. The House of Representatives is set to vote on a $70 billion package for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, a sum that would bankroll the deportation drive for three full years no matter what else changes in Washington.
The bill, branded the Secure America Act, sends $38.6 billion to ICE, $26 billion to Border Protection and a further $5 billion to the Department of Homeland Security to spend on enforcement as it chooses. It cleared the Senate at the end of last week by 52 votes to 47, with only one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, joining every Democrat against it, and the House is expected to approve the same text within days.
The figure is staggering on its own, and it is not even the whole of it. The money comes on top of the roughly $170 billion that a 2025 tax law had already routed to immigration enforcement, including some $75 billion earmarked for ICE alone, split between a vast expansion of detention capacity and the agents who carry out raids. The cumulative effect is that ICE has become, by a wide margin, the best-funded federal law enforcement body in the country, larger in budget than the FBI, the agency that critics have taken to calling a deportation industrial complex.
How it is being passed matters as much as the amount. By moving the funding through budget reconciliation, Republicans need no Democratic votes and face no filibuster, which lets them lock in three years of money for the two agencies on a party-line margin. Whatever the next Congress looks like, the cash will already be committed. It is a way of building the apparatus so deeply into the budget that unwinding it later becomes its own enormous fight.
The standoff that produced the bill began in violence. In January, ICE and Border Protection agents killed two US citizens during a raid in Minneapolis, and Democrats responded by refusing to keep funding the agencies, triggering a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that ran for 76 days, the longest in its history, before a partial deal reopened it in April. The reconciliation route is how the party in power has now stepped around that resistance entirely.
The money does not fund an agency in isolation. It powers the same machine behind the rest of the administration’s project, the drive to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, the plan to reject asylum claims without a hearing, the raids and the rising arrest quotas. Seventy billion dollars buys the capacity to do all of it at a scale the country has not seen, more agents, more beds, more operations in more cities.
It arrives, too, at a moment when Trump’s own party has shown it can break with him, having revolted weeks earlier over a separate spending fight. On immigration, though, the Republican line holds. The deportation drive is the one undertaking the party will reliably finance even as it quarrels over almost everything else, and the agency that a growing share of Americans tell pollsters they distrust is the one Congress keeps making richer.
The House is expected to pass the package and send ICE and Border Protection their three-year guarantee. What the money buys is not in question: more enforcement, more detention, more removals. What it does not buy is any new limit on how the agency that already killed two citizens in Minneapolis chooses to use it, and that absence, in a bill this size, is not an oversight. It is the design.
