The reconciliation bill would provide a completely unprecedented amount of funding for ICE. Over the four-year period, ICE’s budget would be slightly larger than the budgets of the FBI, [Drug Enforcement Administration], [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], Bureau of Prisons, and US Marshals Service combined. ICE would have more funding than any federal law enforcement agency has had in history.

In addition, ICE would get substantially more funding for detention than the federal prison system, whose annual budget is about $8.5 billion. Currently ICE’s annual budget for detention is $3.4 billion, and this bill would give it $45 billion to spend on detention through September 2029, which depending on how they spend the money over the next fifty-one months, could even permit ICE to detain substantially more people than the 150,000 held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons today.

Whether ICE could actually increase capacity to that level is an open question. This is an enormous sum of money, but there are bottlenecks when it comes to things like the staffing of detention centers.

On top of this detention budget, you have a massive increase in funding for ICE’s transportation and removal operations. The House bill broke up this funding into a few different buckets, whereas the Senate bill largely puts this all in a lump sum of around $30 billion, which ICE would have more flexibility to spend.

Under either plan, ICE would have funding to hire up to ten thousand new officers and the ability to expand its removal operations, both for the transportation of migrants within the country and then the planes and pilots necessary to carry out deportations.

Right now ICE only has about thirteen or fourteen planes readily available at any time to use for deportations. With the over $10 billion that they could use on removal, they would almost certainly be able to acquire more aircraft, and that would allow them to increase the deportation throughput along with staffing. Of course, as with detention, just because they get the money doesn’t mean that they can immediately acquire all these assets, and this effort will ramp up over a period time.

It’s not entirely clear whether ICE could actually spend all of this money in four years. This is a staggering sum for the agency. We are talking about an amount about seven times the agency’s normal annual budget on top of that budget. In effect, it would increase the agency’s annual budget by about three times, from about $9.6 billion currently to around $27 billion on an annualized basis through September 2029. Congress has given ICE a large amount of flexibility about how and when they can spend the funds.

Depending on how you count them, there are currently only around six thousand ICE officers. If you actually look at the deportation forces specifically, the staff is even smaller than that: more like three to four thousand officers. So if they were able to hire ten thousand new deportation officers, it really would be a major increase.

But I’m actually quite skeptical of their ability to hire that many, just because there is a law enforcement officer shortage everywhere. Every police department in the country is having trouble hiring right now, so it’s unclear how many people they could get through the federal hiring process in four years, especially because that process is quite slow. A lot of people who seek these law enforcement jobs have problems passing drug tests and clearing background checks, which are issues you’d be very wrong to think people who apply for these types of jobs don’t have.

So on the question of contractors, yes, the overwhelming majority of this funding would go to private contractors. ICE only directly operates a small handful of facilities, and the rest are either directly contracted with private prison operators or contracted with state and local governments that are likewise operating facilities through private prison contractors. So overall, over 90 percent of ICE detention centers right now are operated by private contractors.

And when you look at the actual transportation and removal side, nearly all of that is also done by private companies. ICE’s aircraft are not owned by ICE. They are owned by private charter services. (The biggest is Omni Air, a subsidiary of private prison company GEO Group.)

Nearly all of ICE’s transportation removal budget goes to contractors already, because ICE doesn’t want to have its own dedicated transportation staff. They’re happier spending their budget on private charter services, and there’s no reasons to think that would change.

So we can presume that the lion’s share of this more than $70 billion for ICE, with the exception of funding that goes directly toward its infrastructure improvements and hiring, will be going to private contractors.

Immigration is a difficult topic for a lot of politicians to talk about on the Left and even in the center. Donald Trump campaigned on mass deportations and won in no small part due to the situation at the Southern border. Of course there were plenty of other reasons that he won, and politicians who reduce Trump’s victory to immigration are being reductionist. But this has, nevertheless, made many Democrats nervous to talk about these issues.

That said, as we’ve seen since the Los Angeles unrest began, Trump’s approval ratings on immigration are plummeting, and a lot of people are very unhappy about what ICE is doing in communities right now. Yet there are just so many things in this bill for people to be concerned about, and it’s very hard to get a message through on this particular thing, which would fundamentally reshape immigration enforcement in the United States.

Trump wants to have a bill signed on July 4. There’s no other reason for that. It’s for public relations.

It’s a really tricky question, because right now we are seeing ICE go after people who have lived in the United States for a long time, not just recent migrants. Plenty of these people have already developed ties to communities here, applied for relief, or may even have gotten married to US citizens or have children who are citizens.

We have already seen huge sums thrown at the border in the past. In the post-9/11 era, we see the largest growth of the border patrol in history, nearly doubling in size under the Bush administration from about ten thousand agents to just over twenty thousand. That level of hiring was really chaotic. They were just trying to get warm bodies out there, and they ended up hiring a number of cartel double agents that took some years to be found out.

Right now the Trump administration wants to conflate what’s happening in the interior with the border, even though the border is quieter than it has been in fifty-plus years. Migrants are taking a wait-and-see approach, in part because they’ve observed that this administration doesn’t have any red lines regarding its treatment of people. They are happy to send people to South Sudan or Libya or to CECOT in El Salvador so that people get the message.

But ICE is not going to hit Trump’s one million deportations quota this year. It will probably not hit it next year. And they will probably not hit it the year after either. Even with this additional funding they will struggle to hit one million deportations a year because that is a staggeringly high number.

The highest number of deportations from the interior in history was 238,000, in fiscal year 2009, at a time when ICE was at the height of its powers and state and local governments almost universally fully cooperated with ICE. There were essentially no sanctuary policies in place at the time. This is when Barack Obama was labeled the “deporter in chief.”

Further back, in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] used to just go into a Hispanic and Latino communities and round people up. Trump’s favorite, Operation Wetback, implemented in 1954, was really just the INS grabbing anyone who looked Mexican, including US citizens who at the time were less likely to have documentation proving it, and throwing them in cattle cars to dump them on the other side of the Mexican border. This is what Trump wants to do with this funding, which he’s openly advertised.

Trump’s plan also just looks like tent camps. Ron DeSantis is opening such a camp in the Everglades. These facilities of trailers and tents are expensive to operate — much more expensive than regular detention centers. And the conditions inside them are often terrible.

An ICE analysis, ahead of the Laken Riley Act in January, determined that if they were to use every single empty bed in a permanent facility in the nation, they could maybe hit seventy-five thousand people in detention. Anything above that would require the construction of new facilities like the one in Florida.

It’s very hard to say how many of these they could build — not due to a lack of resources but principally because of the problems of staffing and where to build them. But this is the future of detention under this bill.

The spending bill would also give billions of dollars to state and local governments to increase their own immigration enforcement operations, so you’d see things like what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida proliferating in Texas and other states, should the bill go forward. This new funding, in short, represents an expansion of interior enforcement like nothing we’ve ever seen in modern US history.

The parliamentarian struck down some of the worst of these fees. They would have charged every person $1,000 to apply for asylum even if they were detained, even if they were children, which would mean, in practice, that people simply could not apply for asylum.

But many of the fees are still in there, and they appear designed to essentially impoverish immigrants and make humanitarian migration less desirable. That includes $500 initial fees for asylum work permits, parole work permits, and temporary protected status work permits, as well as $275 renewal fees for those.

On top of that, there would be significant fees for anyone seeking any kind of nonimmigrant visa. In the case of a tourist visa, for example, you’d essentially be forced to lend the United States $250 for ten years. And at the end of that, you have to file a bunch of paperwork to get that money back, which likely won’t be easy. These fees raise money for ICE by putting the cost on anyone applying for legal immigration benefits.

On top of that, there are fees that essentially act as civil penalties. There would be a $5,000 fee for crossing the border between ports of entry or missing a court hearing. If you are ordered removed in absentia under this bill, they will charge you $5,000, even if you missed a court hearing because of a car accident or other situation outside your control. It’s clearly a punishment, but they frame it as a fee, not a fine.

The removal of the undocumented, about 4 percent of the US population, is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. No other country has ever deported twelve to fifteen million people in human history. If you ask the average American, I don’t think they want to be that society, despite them believing that maybe we should deport the people with criminal records.

But as a broad matter, polling also consistently shows that the majority of the American public does not believe people with US citizen family members who don’t have a criminal record should be kicked out, and that is the vast majority of the undocumented population. Even people who say they support mass deportation usually also support a path to permanent legal status for people who’ve been here for ages without trouble.

We are not accustomed as a society to what we’re seeing ICE do today: masked law enforcement officers with no insignias, no badges, no uniforms coming into communities and rounding people up.

Mass deportation wouldn’t only reshape American society and cause the economy to go into a tailspin. It would also lead to a very different relationship between the US populace and law enforcement. You don’t build the mass deportation machine without building the police state first.