A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The tax and spending bill recently signed into law by President Trump provides a major infusion of cash into his efforts to crack down on illegal immigration. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency - or ICE - received around $150 billion.
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TOM HOMAN: So now ICE finally is getting the resources they need.
MARTÍNEZ: That's border czar Tom Homan speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday.
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HOMAN: And, you know, it's going to put more boots on the ground, which we need right now.
MARTÍNEZ: For a breakdown on how the funding increase might reshape immigration enforcement in the U.S., I called up Daniel Costa. He's director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank which receives support from major labor unions. I started by asking him how this money will be spent.
DANIEL COSTA: You get about 30 billion towards ICE's enforcement and deportation operations, which is about triple their current budget. About 45 billion goes to building immigration detention centers. And that's up from their current budget of 3.4 billion. And then you're going to get almost 47 billion to build the border wall.
MARTÍNEZ: Daniel, you mentioned the 45 billion toward building detention facilities. Are they going out to just contracts for anyone to bid on? Or are they contracts for companies that, say, already have ties to, say, the administration?
COSTA: That money is going to go mainly to two corporations that already run most of the immigrant detention centers, and that's CoreCivic and the GEO Group. And ICE has already been putting out bids for this work for a number of months in anticipation of getting that money. And some of them are going to be no-bid contracts.
MARTÍNEZ: And this money is going to be spent right away, right? They're not going to wait or anything. They want to make sure that money gets spent immediately.
COSTA: It will be appropriated right away, the way that the law is written. But it can be used through September 2029. But based on the contracts that ICE has been putting out there, it looks like they want to spend it mostly in the first two years. And the real shocking part of this is that ICE is going to have more money for detention than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons gets on an annualized basis, something like 50% more. And so ICE is going to be the most well-, highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country.
MARTÍNEZ: And the oversight for all of this spending, is that just for the Trump administration to have? Or can Congress be a part of this?
COSTA: Well, Congress could legislate something, but they didn't put very much oversight into the bill. And the Trump administration has fired many of the inspectors general that do this type of oversight.
MARTÍNEZ: Should there be some kind of cap on the budget for immigration enforcement? How is all that impacting the budget of other agencies?
COSTA: So Congress appropriates about 30 billion a year for immigration enforcement. But to go from 30 billion to jump up to 160, 170 billion more that comes out of this bill, we're talking about massive amounts of numbers. And the impacts are just going to be unfathomable. We're heading straight into becoming a surveillance state and a police state.
MARTÍNEZ: So, I mean, are we in terms of talking about actual seeing ICE agents going through cities, walking around, seeing them more often?
COSTA: Yes, the level of intrusion, I don't think people can wrap their brains around it yet. You're going to see ICE agents at schools, at parks, at hospitals, at car washes, at grocery stores, really just about everywhere where immigrants work. And we should remind people, 1 out of every 5 workers in the country right now is an immigrant.
MARTÍNEZ: So once this money starts getting spent, I mean, how would the public know that this huge budget has actually, quote-unquote, "worked."
COSTA: I suppose the Trump administration thinks that the result will be achieving their deportation targets. And their deportation targets are set at around 1 million per year for four years. And that's up from a baseline of around 300,000 deportations that happen in most years. I think we're going to see some really negative impacts on the economy and the labor force. My colleague at EPI published an estimate recently that found that if Trump reaches those deportation targets, we're going to see job losses of about 6 million. And about 44% of those are actually going to be jobs lost by U.S.-born workers.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. Daniel, thanks.
COSTA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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