Republicans Are Triple-Dipping Funding for Mass Deportation

ICE and CBP have gotten nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars under Trump in the last year. The GOP is still trying to add more.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/11/republicans-triple-dipping-funding-for-mass-deportation/



The basic structure of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was this: savage cuts to social benefits of all kinds, including Medicaid, food stamps, and (implicitly) Obamacare, coupled to massive tax cuts for the rich, and a stupendous increase in funding for mass deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) together got a whopping $170 billion—making it better funded than any military outside of China, Russia, and the U.S. itself—with little if any controls or oversight on how the money was spent.

The supposed point of this was to pre-fund the deportation surge through Trump’s entire term, in case Democrats won the midterms. That funding is available through 2028 at least. In response, and in protest over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats shut down the base Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget and refused to fund ICE and CBP any further. The thinking was that these agencies could use their surge money for normal operations until they got back toward a normal budget outlay. Republicans then did another end run, with a reconciliation bill that added $70 billion in base ICE and CBP funding for three years. This comes to a total of $240 billion—almost a quarter-trillion dollars—for these two relatively minor agencies.

Unbelievably, it turns out that House Republicans are working on a DHS appropriations bill for the next fiscal year that would increase ICE/CBP funding even more, by another $28.4 billion. This represents a bulked-up appropriation for these agencies, even though that was just passed in the second reconciliation package. They are apparently pretending the whole double pre-funding thing didn’t happen. The number, when it comes to mass deportation at least, can only go up.

And yet few Democrats are making a stink about this endless ratcheting up of funding for Trump’s mass deportation machine. The ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security is once again Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), back after Trump pardoned him out of his Biden-era corruption indictment. Little can be expected from that quarter. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking member of the overall Appropriations Committee, at least put out a statement condemning the reconciliation bill. “I am leading the way to implement major reforms that will transform these agencies which currently operate like an unaccountable paramilitary force,” it said. But it’s fair to say there has not been a coordinated Democratic effort to point out that this tripling down for deportation funding is happening.

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