A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a new immigration bill (“Border Act”) backed by the White House. The bill is a mixed bag. In general, the main purpose of the bill is to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on detaining and deporting more immigrants from the border rather than finding ways to let them come legally.
These provisions will lead to more chaos and even more demands for more money. But some elements of the deal would improve the system, making legal immigration slightly easier for some groups.
Reckless government spending
The overall legislation—which includes foreign aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan—will cost $118 billion. This money is designated as emergency supplemental funding, meaning that Congress does not need to find a way to pay for it. It also occurs outside of the normal budgetary process, which means that Congress will completely disregard all tradeoffs between this spending and other alternative uses for the money. The immigration-related portion is $20.1 billion—$6.5 billion more than the White House requested.
This money will mainly go toward the most well-financed law enforcement agencies in the United States. The federal government already spends more on immigration and trade enforcement than all other federal law enforcement combined. For context, $20.1 billion is roughly double the FBI’s annual budget. Regardless, as my colleagues Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett write, “rushing funding out the door is more likely to lead to wasteful spending.”
The increases proposed by this bill and the timeframes in place to spend them (usually September 2026) effectively guarantee gross financial mismanagement:
- Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is adding nearly $7 billion to a $18 billion budget, and most of the money is going to the Border Patrol, which has a budget of about $5 billion.
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is receiving $7.6 billion—nearly double its annual budget.
- US Citizenship and Immigration Services will add $4 billion to a $313 million budget for asylum processing.
The bill also plans to fund permanent infrastructure and permanent positions with supplemental appropriations, making it likely that this one-time supplemental becomes a regular occurrence. Aside from the new expulsion authority, the centerpiece of the bill’s policy changes is to make USCIS handle all asylum processing from the border, costing nearly $4 billion upfront and involving the hiring of 4,338 Asylum Officers.
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