The budget bill just passed by the Senate provides more than $ 170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement and detention. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who worked on an analysis published by the American Immigration Council, says the new budget would make ICE the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez. Much of the discussion around Trump’s budget bill has focused on the massive cuts to Medicaid, the tax giveaways to the rich, and the impact on the national debt to the tune of $ 3 trillion. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance, who cast the tie-breaking vote, was focused elsewhere: on immigration. He wrote on social media, quote, Everything else – the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy – is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions, unquote. This bill provides a whopping $ 170 billion to transform immigration enforcement and detention. This includes $ 45 billion for new detention jails. That’s 265% more than the current ICE detention budget and more than the budget of the federal prison system. ICE’s enforcement budget would increase by $ 30 billion, a threefold increase, and there’s some $ 46 billion for border walls and more. American Immigration Council calls the bill, quote, the largest investment in detention and deportation in US history; a policy choice that does nothing to address the systemic failures of our immigration system while inflicting harm, sowing chaos, and tearing families apart, unquote. For more, we’re joined by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which just published the in-depth analysis of the immigration enforcement provisions of the bill. Aaron, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, you have the bill being passed, eked through, needed the vice president to pass the – to cast the tie-breaking vote. And Trump wasn’t celebrating in D.C. He was deflecting attention from the millions who would lose Medicaid funding, something like 17 million, to go to what he’s calling Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades. Talk about the significance of this and this proposed massive increase to the ICE budget. AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, if we look at the reconciliation bill, we can see that the amount of funding that ICE would get under this bill would be transformative for the agency. We’re talking nearly 20 years’ worth of detention funding to be spent only in a four-year period, and an increase to ICE’s enforcement budget beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, allowing the agency to expand mass deportations over the next four years to every community nationwide. JUAN GONZALEZ: [inaudible] budget proposal, immigration enforcement was costing the federal government more than all of the other federal law enforcement agencies combined. We’re talking about the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. The law enforcement – the immigration enforcement budget was already larger than all of those together. What size are we talking about now in terms of this expansion? AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: Yeah, we are talking about a significant increase, beyond every other federal law enforcement agency. If this money goes through, if the House votes for this bill, you will see ICE now being the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation, potentially with enough funding to hire more law enforcement agents than the FBI and more detention potentially than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons. And beyond that, the funds also provide billions of dollars to state and local governments, meaning that when you look at the Everglades detention camp that Trump was at yesterday, you could see every cent of that facility being paid for by the federal government and not by Florida. Similar facilities are likely to open in other GOP states, because we see that the reconciliation bill contains $ 3.5 billion for ICE to hand out to states that are looking to do similar things to what Governor DeSantis has done already. So, really transformative at a national level and at a state level for immigration enforcement in this country, like nothing we’ve seen in the modern era. JUAN GONZALEZ: And could you talk about the impact that this is having on the ground in the communities affected? For instance, there are reports now that in Los Angeles County, the ridership on mass transportation there has dropped about 15%, and largely Latinos and immigrants are the ones riding the buses and rapid transit in Los Angeles. AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: [inaudible] measurable drop in civic participation in communities where this kind of enforcement is being carried out. People aren’t going to their jobs. People aren’t going to school. Children are staying home. Parents are keeping their kids in safety. They aren’t riding the buses. They aren’t going to the parks. They aren’t going to restaurants. Takeout is up in New York City, in places where these crackdowns have gone on. So, we are seeing immigration enforcement ripple through the United States, and the impacts being felt particularly in communities that have been the target for heavy enforcement by the Trump administration. And should this bill pass, they could potentially get the resources to do heavy enforcement in not just Los Angeles, but in New York, in Chicago, in Philadelphia. In every major city around the country, you could see another Los Angeles. AMY GOODMAN: Aaron, can you say why you refuse to use the term Alligator Alcatraz, instead saying Everglades detention camp? AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: I mean, Alligator Alcatraz, it’s a public relations name. It’s – you know, Alcatraz was a prison where it held people who had been convicted of crimes and were serving their sentence. But immigration detention is not for people serving criminal sentences. The people held in detention often have no criminal record, or they have minor, lower misdemeanors, or if they do have a serious criminal record, they’ve usually served their time and, if they were U.S. citizens, would have already been released. You know, the Trump administration loves to say that it’s only going after the worst of the worst, but when they sent hundreds of people to Guantanamo Bay, fully a third of them had no criminal convictions at all. And we’ve seen with their deportation of people to CECOT in El Salvador to be imprisoned without trial, that hundreds of those people were likely innocent of any claimed gang ties and had no criminal records at all. So, this is not Alcatraz. It’s a detention camp that ICE is using to hold immigrants, many of whom will likely have no criminal record.

RealClearPolitics Videos