Trump’s Big Bill Spends Billions on ICE Agents and Deportations

Scenes of “law enforcement” that look like lawlessness are unfolding, daily, on the streets of America. 

Masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies jump out of unmarked cars. They wear masks and are often irregularly uniformed, in a slapdash assemblage of jeans and security vests. Some may have labels reading POLICE. Some may have badges. Others dress in t-shirts and baseball caps. They often refuse to identify themselves or produce warrants. 

These squads are snatching individuals off the streets, and out of federal courthouses, and wrestling them into vehicles to be spirited away in a spectacle that even a U.S. senator has likened to “being kidnapped.”

This anarchic authoritarianism is playing out in isolated pockets, for now. But if the budget reconciliation legislation known as President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” becomes law, the horror will spread nationwide. 

“This bill is a force multiplier for ICE,” Nayna Gupta, Policy Director of the pro-immigrant American Immigration Council tells Rolling Stone. “It allows them to hire 10,000 more agents around the country,” she says, “while simultaneously deputizing state and local police departments to do things like interrogate, arrest, detain and deport immigrants.”

The Senate’s version of the bill steers an astonishing $130 billion into immigration enforcement, detention, and border security, according to the American Immigration Council’s tally, which includes funding for Trump’s border wall. In the buildup to passage in the Senate, this funding became the central MAGA sales pitch. “Everything else” — including the bill’s staggering cuts to the social safety net — “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X Monday night,  Vance’s post preceded, by hours, his casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s nativist policy chief, touts the Big Beautiful Bill for the same reason Gupta blasts it: “The BBB will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens,” Miller posted on X in June, branding the bill, with a chauvinistic flourish, “the most essential piece of legislation… in the entire Western World, in generations.”

Building the case for the bill, Trump’s so-called Border Czar, Tom Homan, appeared last week at a conference in Washington D.C. held by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a right-wing organization led by the scandal-tainted evangelical power broker Ralph Reed. Homan got raucous cheers from the Christian audience for a profanity-laced speech, in which he touted the administration’s agenda to arrest and remove the strangers among us. “If I offend anybody today,” Homan said, “I don’t give a shit.”

In his speech, Homan advanced a version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. He baselessly alleged that Democrats under Joe Biden “unsecured the border on purpose” to build a new political power base of immigrants. “They knew exactly what they’re doing,” Homan said. “They saw future political benefit on doing it. They thought millions of people coming into the country are going to be future Democratic voters.” Homan continued: “They sold this country out for future political power. And to me, that’s treasonous.”

Homan talked up congressional passage of the Big Beautiful Bill as a countermeasure: “They pass that bill, we’re gonna have more money than we ever had to do immigration enforcement,” he said, adding gruffly: “You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.” (Homan’s comments were first highlighted by Right Wing Watch.)

The Big Beautiful Bill will swell the ranks of ICE agents. The Senate bill earmarks about $30 billion for recruiting and retention; the House version specifies the hiring of nearly 10,000 new agents, or “boots on the ground,” as Homan described them, militaristically. The bill also has more than $45 billion to ramp up detention facilities and detainee transportation — to turn the Trump deportation machine into what acting ICE director Todd Lyons envisions as an Amazon-like logistics operation: “Like Prime, but with human beings.” 

Gupta, the immigrant-rights policy advocate, tells Rolling Stone: “The dollar numbers that we’re seeing here will have the effect of creating an immigration detention system as large, or larger, than the U.S. federal prison system.” She adds that the law would create an “enforcement regime that militarizes American communities in a much more extreme way than what we’ve already seen in the first six months of the Trump administration.”

Homan, in his speech, pointed to current ICE detention capacity as limiting arrests, with the administration playing a constant “chess game” to clear out enough beds to then jail more migrants. “We need 100,000 beds. So I can fill 100,000 beds,” Homan said. “We should be coming to work every day saying, Get everybody you can get. And we got the bed waitin’.”

Homan’s current “game” has deadly consequences for detainees held in crowded conditions: “We’ve already seen 10 deaths in immigration facilities in just five months,” says Gupta, citing reports of “horrific conditions inside the facilities, including starvation, lack of gynecological care for women, [and] delayed insulin treatment for diabetic patients.” In a press availability Monday, Homan responded with indifference to the report of the recent in-custody death of a 75-year-old Cuban immigrant who’d first arrived in the United States in 1966: “People die in ICE custody,” Homan said. “People die in county jails. People die in state prisons.”

Speaking to the religious audience in D.C., the border czar insisted that President Trump’s orders to target “the worst first” is still in effect. But he made clear that anyone without legal status should live in fear of what’s coming. “The media has been hitting me up lately saying, Homan is lying. They’re not arresting just criminals and public safety threats. They’re arresting non-criminals. What they’re afraid to tell you is: Yeah, they’re in a country illegally. So they’re on the table too.”

The Big Beautiful Bill also provides, Gupta says, $10 billion in funding to deputize local law enforcement into the detention and deportation ranks — a move that seems destined to exacerbate the rag-tag optics of armed men wearing face gaiters jumping out of cars and tackling alleged undocumented immigrants.

In a recent TV interview, ICE’s Lyons said he would prefer that officers not mask, because it is “hot” and “dangerous.” But he justified the practice, because “ICE agents are being doxed at a horrible rate.” Doxing refers to making personal details public. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about Lyons’ definition of doxing, in what circumstances it is a crime (there is a narrow federal anti-doxing provision), or what horrific metric Lyons was referring to. 

However DHS makes no apologies for the fact that “undercover” federal officers on immigration duty look like irregular combatants. “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Rolling Stone.

In a separate statement, DHS maintained that its agents always “verbally identify themselves as with ICE or Homeland Security,” that they “wear vests that say ICE/ERO or Homeland Security,” and that they’re “flanked by vehicles that also say the name of the department.” Such claims are contradicted by viral videos and Senate hearings. 

Consider the case of Brad Lander, the New York City mayoral candidate who was tackled and detained after trying to accompany a New Yorker through the hallway of a federal court courthouse after an immigration proceeding. One of the apparent under-cover agents who nabbed Lander wore jeans and a shirt branded “Rogue” — from a clothing company whose motto is: “We do not come in peace.”

In a recent Senate hearing Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi on the dangers of masked ICE agents who do “not follow required protocol to identify themselves as law enforcement.” Peters told Bondi he was “deeply concerned” about the “lack of identification” by federal agents, calling it “dangerous both to the public as well as to the officers themselves.” He told Bondi that “the public risks being harmed by individuals pretending to be immigration enforcement which has already happened.” He added that federal agents “also risk being injured by individuals who think they’re basically being kidnapped or attacked by some unknown assailant.”

In the face of this questioning, the attorney general struck a pose of ignorance. “Senator Peters, that’s the first time that issue has come to me.” But Bondi countered that agents “are being doxed,” adding: “They’re being threatened; their families are being threatened.”

In his speech to Faith & Freedom, Homan talked up how the feds are arresting those who challenge ICE and its irregular operations — making plain that legal peril awaits any would-be Good Samaritan who misapprehends an authorized ICE arrest as violent crime: “You can’t impede our enforcement efforts. That’s a felony, and we will prosecute,” Homan said. “You cannot put your hands on an ICE officer. We’re prosecuting two judges. We’re prosecuting a member of Congress,” he bragged. “You can’t cross the line.”

ICE’s current director, Lyons has blamed the city of Portland, Oregon, for the agency’s masking imperative, telling an interviewer: “We had ICE officers’ names, addresses, and family Instagrams [and] Facebook posted and spread all around the city of Portland, saying ‘No Rest For Ice.’”

It will not come as any surprise that ICE agents are not celebrated in the biggest, bluest city in Oregon, a sanctuary state, where law enforcement is largely prohibited from participating in immigration enforcement. Portland has been ground zero for confrontations between protesters and the feds in recent years. Trump pioneered a militarized crackdown on protesters in Portland in 2020, when citizens were snatched off the sidewalk into unmarked cars, and feds shot chemical munitions and less-lethal projectiles against people protesting police violence.

Though they have not matched the intensity of the conflict in Los Angeles, where Trump federalized the National Guard and deployed the Marines, anti-ICE protests here have been smoldering here for weeks.

The ICE facility in Portland is catty corner to the city’s main Tesla dealership — itself the target of incessant protests in recent weeks. The ICE building resembles a minimum security prison, and it occupies an odd-angled city block hemmed in by a freeway and overgrown trolley tracks. The three-story taupe concrete structure is currently up-armored in plywood, its windows and doors covered to the second floor. 

The building is also splashed with graffiti ranging from Zen-like scolding — “LOOK INWARD” — to the bloodthirsty — “Kill KKKops.” Many of the messages equate ICE with the “Gestapo.” One grafito reads: “NAZI CUCKS.” Across the street from the gates of the main driveway, a small group of protesters is gathered by a folding table and a sun tent. Some are yelling “Fuck ICE!”  They have a sign for passing motorists reading: “YOU’RE NOT SAFE, YOU’RE NEXT.”

The air on a recent weekday afternoon is spicy with the scent of exploded pepper balls and “green gas,” a crowd-control chemical, deployed against protesters the previous night when federal agents in riot gear emerged to confront a woman, whom DHS’s McLaughlin alleges “threatened officers with a large knife by swinging it and then throwing it at them.” (The woman has been charged with attempted assault of a federal officer.)

A 47-year-old protester who identified herself only as Jezzy told Rolling Stone that she’d been coming to the “nonviolent encampment” most nights since the “No Kings” rallies against Trump in mid-June, along with her “Latina Aztec daughter,” who’s 18. Jezzy says she left before the violent clash the previous night, but added that showdowns between protesters and the feds were commonplace.

“I don’t know how many times we’ve been smoke bombed,” Jezzy says. “We got gassed very badly our first night.” After dark, as Jezzy describes it, feds in riot gear often emerge from the gate and fire pepper balls against protesters. She accuses them of “ripping up protester signs.” 

She describes these federal agents as “very, very angry” and “abusive of all the fucking rights anybody has as a human — or as an American.” Despite a personal toll, Jezzy insists she’s committed to showing up to defend community members at risk from Trump and his faceless forces. She describes her new daily ritual: “I work. I protest. I do it all over again.”