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The Big Beautiful Act will experience Trump’s immigration repression. This is the way in 6 charts.

Republicans are handing President Trump a lot of money to fund his tough immigration agenda. The “big bill” facing the House’s ultimate legislative obstacles include approximately $170 billion in additional funding to enhance Trump’s massive expulsion efforts and improve border security.

Although the debate that Republicans should have in the final package is underway, none of these differences are concentrated on the little-changing debate between immigration funds around the Senate and House versions of the bill. The big box office will allow the Trump administration to build new immigration detention centers, hire thousands of immigration officials, build new parts of the border wall that Trump has long advocated, and put billions into other aspects of immigration enforcement.

Here are the details of what the bill means for the U.S. immigration system.

Border wall

One of Trump’s signature commitments to his first presidency was his commitment to building an “indestructible, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall” over the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Legal challenges, logistical barriers and shortages of funds prevent him from fulfilling this promise. In his first semester, his administration replaced existing barriers worth 400 miles, but built only 47 miles of new walls, without a new wall before, with an estimated cost of $15 billion.

According to estimates from the Gop-Leed House Compants on Homeand Commission, the new bill offers more than three times the cost of “integrating the boundary barrier system”, which includes a plan to build 700 miles of new walls, 900 miles of obstacles along the Rio Grande River, more than 600 miles of secondary obstacles, and a range of cutting-edge technologies to facilitate Gop’s housing commission’s estimates.

Immigration Detention

Since returning to the White House, Trump has hosted an unprecedented and controversial campaign to sweep and expel millions of immigrants living in the United States, but his ambitions reveal the agency’s logistical capabilities to enforce these orders, especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (ICE).

So far this year, ICE has been more than twice the number of arrests in 2024, but has not yet met the targets set by its government. Deportations have also increased, but deportations were also slightly higher than their positions during former President Joe Biden’s tenure last year.

One of the biggest bottlenecks in slowing down ice deportation is the lack of space to accommodate everyone who wants to be detained. Officially, ICE’s national detention centers have enough money to accommodate 41,000 beds, but the agency reported that it was detaining more than 59,000 people as of the end of last month.

The bill includes $45 billion to significantly improve ICE’s detention capacity. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the agency’s current $3.4 billion detention budget will more than double the next year and gradually increase until it reaches nearly $15 billion by 2029.

The bill does not require ICE to build a specific number of beds, but Trump’s border campus, Tom Homan, said the agency will require at least 100,000 beds to implement its massive eviction plan. Some experts believe that the true total could eventually prove to be as high as 200,000.

With a large influx of funds, immigration detention will rival the federal prison system in terms of capacity and funding. Currently, more than 155,000 people are in federal prisons nationwide, far above the ICE’s stated goal, but are estimated to decline. Thanks to fundraising in the bill, the average annual budget of the Prison Bureau over the next 10 years is about $9.5 billion. This roughly corresponds to the average annual detention center funding of ICE of $9.7 billion, but the CBO expects ICE to receive $14.9 billion in 2029 compared to the $14.9 billion in ICE.

More law enforcement, more obstacles

In addition to providing additional funds for walls and detention centers, the bill will also provide ICE with $31 billion, with much of that funding aimed at helping the agency hire new law enforcement officers. Currently, the agency has 6,000 employees working on its law enforcement and evacuation operations. The bill will provide ICE with more resources to hire 10,000. Another $12 billion of the bill will be handed over to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency to hire 5,000 new customs personnel and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.

The bill allocated $12.5 billion to support immigration enforcement efforts by state and local authorities. It will also provide $6.2 billion in border screening and surveillance technologies, “including artificial intelligence, machine learning and other innovative technologies.”

The legislation will also impose new fees on immigrants who want to get legally retained to apply for asylum in the United States, which is now free and will now bring in $100. The cost of applying for temporary protection status will increase from $50 to $500, and the price of an immigration order appeal against a judge will jump from $110 to $900.

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