We’re Finally Learning How ICE Is Spending Its Unlimited Budget. It’s Literally Shocking.

Jurisprudence By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Shirin Ali? Aug 18, 20264:21 PM Money spent. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo via USA Today Network via Reuters Connect. Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law—and how the law is pushing back. You’ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. It’s safe to say that the Trump administration is failing on many fronts: Its economic policy has worsened inflation, its foreign policy has landed America in another seemingly endless war, and its healthcare policy is rejecting decades of research-backed vaccine guidance. In Donald Trump’s goals of tormenting the nation’s immigrants, though, the administration is clearly winning. Sure, there have been plenty of losses in court and in the battle of public opinion, but deportations for fiscal year 2026 still managed to exceed 350,000, on track to beat the Obama administration’s record. Trump also notched decisive victories at the Supreme Court over temporary protected status, legal permanent residents, and his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. On top of this, the president has successfully secured the most funding in U.S. history for the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection, a sum that will outlast his second term, to the tune of approximately $200 billion. Meanwhile, Democrats not only failed to stop this funding; they allowed it to pass with basically no congressional oversight baked in. We’re finally starting to get a sense of what Trump is spending this enormous pot of money on, and, well, it’s ugly, but it’s also terrifyingly effective. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which awarded $170 billion to DHS, ICE, and CBP, is the president’s signature policy bill. It was, among other things, intended to help fulfill this wish of Trump’s: deport 1 million immigrants within his first year in office. One year later, after ICE agents killed two American citizens in Minnesota and inflicted violence against thousands of protesters across the country, congressional Republicans decided to award the agency even more money, as Trump’s goal remained unmet. In June, they passed another $70 billion funding package for DHS through the Secure America Act. Critically, both of these spending bills were passed via reconciliation so Senate Republicans could move them forward with only 51 votes, instead of the typical 60 required for budget negotiations; the bills also featured scant congressional oversight and lacked guidelines dictating how the funds should be allotted. This is an intoxicating amount of money already being abused by an administration that has, for the past 20 months, abused federal law and the courts to fulfill its extremist agenda. Just consider what the country’s top law-enforcement agencies have been buying with their new loot. Last year, under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the agency allocated $464 million for a no-bid contract to purchase 10 airplanes for deportation flights. However, the planes, some of which are luxury business jets, have barely been used because the agency “did not have the staff necessary to operate them.” Because springing for and maintaining a fleet of its own is costly, ICE has historically outsourced its deportation flights to private companies or used military and Coast Guard vessels. You might say that this is not a very effective use of money, and you’d be right. But, waste aside, the threat of this fleet remains. Then there are the recent headlines announcing ICE’s plan to spend $20 million on electric-shock gloves that will deliver “a pain stimulus that typically helps an officer gain compliance within seconds.” One expert told the Associated Press that he envisions these gloves being used when officers encounter resistance, particularly as they try to remove a person from a car or house, or into and out of detention centers. As we’ve seen this year, it’s easy to imagine this violence being inflicted on anyone whom ICE officers decide to target, no matter their immigration status. There’s more. This month, we also learned that Our Rescue, an anti-human-trafficking organization whose founder was accused of sexual exploitation himself, was awarded a $158 million no-bid contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied migrant children. According to NPR, it’s unclear if Our Rescue has lawyers on staff, though its CEO, Derek Benner, previously worked for ICE. Meanwhile, nearly 100 legal nonprofits who have historically been hired by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency charged with overseeing migrant children held by the U.S. government, have watched their contracts expire, without any renewal offers. This is a recipe for disaster for immigrant children who lack permanent legal status; they have been left without legal representation in complex asylum cases. This is simply what has been uncovered in recent weeks, but there’s also the $700 million spent by DHS to convert warehouses all over the country into detention facilities; this initiative has drawn large-scale protests from local residents, even in GOP-majority districts. Again, many of these facilities sit unused, but they remain a threat, as they are still owned by the federal government. We’ve seen in places like the Dilley Immigration Processing Center for family detention, in Texas, and Delaney Hall Detention Facility, in New Jersey, that the administration knows how to warehouse human beings under tortuous conditions. Last week, the New York Times reported that an immigrant had died at Delaney Hall from lack of medical care, the third such case in less than a year. That’s not to mention the massive uptick in investment in surveillance apparatus, a move often fueled by artificial intelligence. These devices collect information about immigrants, citizens and protesters. Meanwhile, lawmakers have not touched U.S. immigration policy in any substantive way that could limit the administration’s agenda; instead, these legislators empower Republicans to throw as much money as they can at DHS while they still retain power in Congress and the White House. When Democrats tried to intervene earlier this year, only after massive public outcry following the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, they failed to force Republicans to agree to guardrails for immigration agents, like a ban on masks and establishing use-of-force standards. Republicans simply waited until the dust settled, dropping their new funding bill in June, when they again used reconciliation to bypass Democrats and award DHS an additional $70 million, an amount that will support the agency through the end of Trump’s second term. Weeks later, an ICE officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had been living and working in the U.S. for decades. Even if Democrats are successful in this year’s midterm election cycle—currently, they’re projected to only narrowly win the House—there isn’t much they can do to stop DHS, ICE, or CBP. Not only has funding for those agencies already been approved through 2029, but Democrats have shown that when push comes to shove, they’re not interested in duking it out with the GOP. Last year, Democrats all over the country organized to highlight how the Trump administration was allowing federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act to expire, a move that would force healthcare costs to skyrocket for thousands of Americans. Instead of holding the line as they leveraged a government funding bill to force Republicans to negotiate on the healthcare issue, eight Senate Democrats broke rank to vote with the GOP, without securing any agreement for healthcare costs. And last week, Democrats quietly agreed to Republicans’ stopgap government funding bill. As midterm elections near, they’ve chosen not to use this moment to foreground the administration’s horrific abuses, let alone force the GOP to course-correct. If Democrats manage to win a majority in the House, they could leverage committee posts to initiate investigations and call Trump officials forward to force them to publicly testify under oath. This is a squarely reactive strategy, however. Democrats will not be in a position to proactively prevent the president’s immigration agenda from killing more people, harming more communities, and ripping families apart. The reality is that Democrats would need to persuade a handful of Republicans, particularly in the Senate, to join them in passing substantive immigration reform. But given how Republicans have typically fallen in line behind Trump, despite dismal approval ratings and 34 people’s deaths in ICE custody—a 22-year high—that may be a pipe dream. “Up until this point, we have really seen most Republicans align with President Trump’s policies,” Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, told me. “I can’t really imagine seeing Republicans, even if they lose one of the chambers, stepping up to challenge the president on some of these immigration policies.” One of the only remaining levers available is in the hands of the American people. If ICE, CBP, and DHS continue to behave egregiously, unnecessarily shocking innocent people with electric gloves, throwing lawful immigrants into deadly detention centers, and killing more Americans with their cars and guns, public outcry will be absolutely vital in forcing the White House’s hand. It’s the one thing that so far seems capable of scaring this administration into some semblance of complying with the law. Donald Trump Immigration Jurisprudence Republicans