Immigration agents prepare to detain an immigrant from Pakistan (in a friend’s car) in Chicago, in June. The Department of Homeland Security is poised to hire thousands of new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and double detention space. Photo / Jamie Kelter Davis, the New York Times
WASHINGTON — Thousands of new deportation agents deployed into American cities.
A doubling of detention space to hold tens of thousands of immigrants before they are expelled.
Kilometres of new border wall, along with surveillance towers equipped with artificial intelligence.
That is the expansive plan that United States President Donald Trump’s top immigration officials now intend to enact after months of struggling to overcome staffing shortages and logistical hurdles that have stymied his pledge to record the most deportations in American history.
After weeks of pressuring members of Congress into supporting his signature domestic policy legislation, Trump has secured an extraordinary injection of funding for his immigration agenda — US$170 billion ($282b), the vast majority of which will go to the Department of Homeland Security over four years.
The annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone will spike from about US$8b to roughly US$28b, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
The new resources will fuel an intense initiative to recruit as many as 10,000 agents who will have a presence in cities including New York and Los Angeles, and throughout the US.
And the money comes as a windfall for private prison companies, who have rushed to pitch the Administration on new contracts to run detention facilities.
“You’re going to see immigration enforcement on a level you’ve never seen it before,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border tsar, said in an interview.
The massive infusion of funds is raising worries that in the rush to make good on Trump’s pledged immigration crackdown, his Administration could cut corners on the careful vetting needed to hire deportation officers.
And immigration advocates say they are bracing for more masked agents to descend upon local communities with heavy-handed tactics.
“There’s an incredible sense of dread, frankly,” said Chris Newman, legal director and general counsel for the National Day Labourer Organising Network, which represents day labourer groups across the country.
So far, he said, Trump has tried to expand his power over immigration through executive actions, some of which have been blocked by the courts.
“But this is legislation, signed into law, and gives people an impression of a sense of permanence, which is ominous,” Newman said.
No matter what, the budget increase will leave a Trump imprint on the American immigration system for years to come, according to current and former immigration officials.
“This is the missing piece in mass deportations that the Administration needed,” said Andrea Flores, who directed border management for the National Security Council in the Biden White House.
“What this signals is a new level of funding for immigration enforcement nationally that likely changes it forever even if Democrats come into power.”
Even with the new funding, Trump’s aides are still hedging on whether they can deliver on their goal to deport one million immigrants lacking legal status this year and millions more before he leaves office.
They are aware that it could take months to scale up new detention facilities and recruit, conduct background checks of and train thousands of immigration agents.
“It’s going to take some time,” Homan said. “We’re already about six months in the game. We just got this money, so we’re going to do the best we can.”
The legislation sets aside roughly US$30b to bolster immigration enforcement through 2029, money that the Administration says will fund the hiring of 10,000 ICE agents. That would bring the total number of deportation officers to 16,000, surpassing the roughly 13,700 special agents at the FBI.
“You’re going to see more agents on the street,” Homan said, adding that the Administration planned to ramp up migrant arrests in cities, in immigration courts and at worksites.
With the surge of agents, he added, the Administration could also target more foreigners who overstay their visas, who immigration experts have said account for a significant portion of those without legal status in the US.
Identifying and hiring thousands of qualified agents will not be easy.
Some former immigration officials warn that the Administration could feel pressure to cut corners on safeguards such as background checks and training to speed the process.
When the US has rushed in the past to surge hiring to federal law enforcement agencies, such as the Bush Administration’s quick expansion of the Border Patrol, the government was plagued with cases of misconduct, they noted.
“There’s going to be a lot of people who are ill-suited to be a law enforcement officer and apply for one of these jobs,” said John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE in the Obama Administration. “I think you’re going to see them pushing and bending every rule they can to get them on the streets as soon as possible.”
Tim Quinn, a former senior official in Customs and Border Protection, said the rapid expansion of the immigration agencies makes accountability mechanisms even more essential. But the Administration this year took steps to dismantle the watchdog agencies inside the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE.
“You got now an agency that has a high influx of resources; what are the oversight capabilities?” said Quinn, who resigned in protest at one of Trump’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion directives this year. “Where does that come from?”
Homan said that the Administration planned to move both quickly and responsibly.
“We want to try to speed up as quickly as we can without sacrificing any of the rules that we have in place that are necessary,” Homan said, adding that officials were planning on expanding the footprint of the ICE academy. “We don’t want to hire the wrong people.”
Homan says one of his top priorities is an expansion of detention capacity, an issue that has long been a challenge for the federal government.
ICE often has to hold immigrants for weeks or even months given a limited number of deportation planes, backlog in immigration courts and inconsistent diplomatic agreements with other nations that take deportees.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement was funded in recent years to hold more than 41,000 immigrants in custody, primarily in private facilities and some county jails.
The agency is already buckling under the pressure of increased enforcement this year, holding about 58,000 immigrants as of this month, according to internal data.
Immigration advocates have raised concerns about overcrowded detention facilities, with some immigrants going a week or more without showers and others sleeping on bare floors.
On a recent day, Homan said, the agency only had about 200 open beds to hold detained immigrants.
The new law includes US$45b for immigration detention, allowing ICE to expand its footprint to 100,000 beds across the US. Homan said he hoped to reach that mark by the end of the year.
Private prison companies stand to benefit greatly from the expansion, with the ability to ramp up detention quickly. Homan said the Administration had received outreach from companies interested in new contracts.
Joe Gomes, managing director of equity research at Noble Capital, said the two biggest companies working with ICE, CoreCivic and Geo Group, each has beds available in existing facilities that they could immediately contract to the agency for tens of millions of dollars.
Spokespeople for both Geo Group and CoreCivic noted that their companies do not lobby for immigration legislation.
“We stand ready to continue to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities,” a spokesperson for Geo Group said in a statement.
Other companies could also get in the mix by quickly standing up tent facilities, which have often been used to hold migrants at the border before turning them away.
Immigrant advocates say the swift upscaling in detention could lead to dangerous conditions.
“They don’t have the beds to detain the numbers this funding equates to, so there is going to be a rush to set up hasty, makeshift prisons, with subpar conditions and infrastructure,” said Robyn Barnard, senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First. “A humanitarian calamity in waiting.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, pushed back on any criticism of the potential surge in ICE deployments and said more attention should be paid to the challenges that agents face.
She also defended the standards of ICE detention facilities. “ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies to ensure that all ICE facilities comply with performance-based national detention standards,” McLaughlin said.
The law also includes more than US$4b to hire and train Customs and Border Protection officials, even though Trump has deployed the military to the border and illegal crossings remain low.
In addition, Trump will have more than US$46b for border wall construction and billions more to finance new applications of AI.
The Administration is also getting a more than US$3b boost for the immigration courts, a system that has long been riddled with delays and staffing shortages.
Both Democrats and Republicans have agreed over the years that the small workforce of judges needs support for the overall immigration system to truly be repaired. But immigration experts question whether the extra funding for additional judges and support staff will be enough to help a system overwhelmed with more than 3.5 million cases.
In order to pay for the investments in Trump’s domestic agenda, Congress imposed cuts to Medicaid and the social safety net.
Immigrants will now have to pay a 1% tax to send money back to family and friends in their home countries and US$100 to apply for asylum. Those asylum-seekers will have to pay an additional US$100 annually while they wait for a decision on their application.
They would pay roughly US$800 more than they pay now to appeal a rejection of their application. Entire classes of legal immigrants, including refugees, will also now be ineligible for Medicare and food stamps.
Flores, the Biden-era immigration official, said all the changes would bolster Trump’s priorities, but at the risk of upending America’s role as a sanctuary for immigrants across the globe.
“This formalises that America’s immigration policy is primarily about enforcing, removing and reducing the size of the immigrant population in the US,” Flores said.
“It’s a signal that Congress has embraced immigration restrictionism and has made enforcement a national priority.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz
Photographs by: Jamie Kelter Davis, Tierney L. Cross, Adriana Zehbrauskas, Adam Gray
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