Trump’s Big Bill Is Building a Big Police State
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s floundering over immigration leaves it without an opposition strategy.
Amid all the frenzied MAGA agitprop and bald-faced lying that have marked the final stages of Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, it’s been easy to lose sight of its transformative policy agenda. Much of the controversy spurred by the sweeping legislation concerns its evisceration of healthcare coverage—a stunning $1 trillion in combined cuts to Medicaid, the state-based program funding healthcare access for low-income Americans, and allied coverage to poor patients under the Affordable Care Act. But the bill, which emerged out of its Senate reconciliation session in a blizzard of votes to amend it on Monday, also erects a permanent immigration police state. With more than $150 billion in outlays to expand the horrific surveillance, detention, and rendition regime created under the Laken Riley Act, the measure will carry out Trump’s pledge to make the terror wreaked by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, alongside federal and National Guard troops, in Los Angeles the standard operating procedure for immigrant roundups going forward.
The scale of the proposed increases in ICE funding alone make for grim dystopian reading. As Don Moynihan notes, ICE’s annual budget for detentions would skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the present fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year—a 365 percent increase, and a figure that outstrips the combined funding of all 50 federal prisons. Here, per Moynihan, are some additional spending comparisons:
The ICE detention budget is larger than the total budget for USAID used to be. The ICE detention budget increase is larger than cuts in education, or for SNAP in the BBB. It is larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined. It is on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars.
These massive giveaways are earmarked for an agency that’s shown a decidedly cursory regard for the fundamental protections afforded to all Americans by the rule of law. In conducting their expansive raids on workers and families that are not suspected of any overt criminal activity, ICE agents have masked themselves to shun responsibility for their actions—an illegal abuse of power commonly associated with Eastern Bloc police states. Reviewing the agency’s recent arrest record, it’s not hard to see why agents don’t want their identities known: On an unprecedented scale, they are rounding up and detaining immigrants who aren’t accused of any criminal activity. ICE’s apprehension of immigrants facing criminal charges are up 128 percent over last year—but the agency’s detention of immigrants without criminal records has increased by more than 1,400 percent. Customs and Border Patrol agents had previously stopped most immigrants without criminal records as they turned them away from the border, by a ratio of 30 to 1. Now that ICE is carrying out White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s new directive to round up anyone who might vaguely resemble an immigrant, that ratio has disappeared. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, each agency is now apprehending roughly equal numbers of immigrants without criminal records. And ICE, of course, is going far out of its way to pursue its Miller-authorized directives to detain and rendition its corps of noncriminal suspects.
Building out the detention capacity of US immigration enforcement by nearly a fourfold factor would elevate the ghoulish white-nationalist policy mandates of Miller into a permanent federal legacy—at the precise moment that the Trump spending bill rolls back basic social-democratic protections from healthcare to food security, to education. And other arms of the federal government are already moving ahead with plans to turbocharge the MAGAfied model of immigration enforcement as a glorified form of political terror and disfranchisement. A recent NPR exposé found that the Department of Homeland Security has joined forces with the data-thugs-without-porfolio at the Department of Government Efficiency to create the federal government’s searchable national citizenship data system. The ostensible mission behind the database is to provide state and local election officials with confirmation of the citizenship status of prospective voters, in line with Trump’s evidence-free claims of rampant immigrant election fraud. The new data network draws on immigration records and Social Security data to produce the country’s first-ever registry of citizens. (Because, as we all know so well by now, combining DOGE and Social Security has been a resounding success in assessing government priorities thus far.)
But the real damage here, as NPR reporters Jude Joffe-Block and Miles note, concerns the creation of a national surveillance state on steroids—without any public debate or consultation with Congress. “This level of integration among federal agencies handling sensitive personal data has never existed before,” they write, “and experts call it a sea change that inches the U.S. closer to having a roster of citizens—something the country has never embraced. A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been considered a third rail—especially to privacy advocates as well as political conservatives, who have traditionally opposed mass data consolidation by the federal government.”
Such concerns are far from theoretical—the Electronic Registration Information Center, a program that compiles voter citizenship data, has seen several red states terminate participation in the program over privacy concerns. Meanwhile, David Jennings, the DHS administrator in charge of the federal Safeguard Voter Eligibility initiative—the Trumpified version of the electronic registry still awaiting final congressional approval—telegraphed its true aims last month when he hosted a briefing with Cleta Mitchell, a leading election-denying attorney who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. When you combine the new surveillance regime for citizenship claims with the dramatic enforcement and detention capacities created for DHS and ICE under the spending bill, you have a formula for the untrammeled expansion of American authoritarianism in all directions, under the bogus directive to clamp down on an immigrant crime wave that simply doesn’t exist.
The vast consolidation of the new surveillance-and-detention hasn’t come in for sustained opposition from Democratic detractors of the Trump bill because overall Democratic messaging on immigration has been locked into a self-defeating defensive crouch for decades. As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has noted, the Trump administration’s reckless and authoritarian immigration raids have produced brutal poll numbers for the president—but since Democrats have mostly adopted me-too positions on the issue, such as calling out Trump’s opportunistic rejection of a terrible, draconian immigration bill tendered by Republican lawmakers last year, they have failed to offer any robust alternative to disenchanted voters.
This stuck-in-neutral posture has regrettably continued over the long debate over the Trump spending bill—to the point where prominent Senate Democrats have argued that the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles were actually a tactic to divert attention from the bill’s unpopular cuts to the social safety net. Those feckless pronouncements not only overlooked the legislation’s actual immigration provisions; they have also continued the Democratic Party’s long-standing avoidance strategy that created the massive demagogic void filled by the MAGA movement in the first place. If the measure that MAGA lawmakers have gloatingly dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill wins passage and creates a new immigration police state in the process, the ugly capitulations of Beltway Democrats will have played no small role in the debacle.
Correction: An earlier version of this post mistakenly identified the Electronic Registration Information Center as a government agency.
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