Trump’s bill paying for rapid expansion of ICE

Tax and spending cuts measure made his mass deportation operation possible.

- By Lisa Mascaro

A TEENAGER is questioned by a U.S. Border Patrol agent after a collision in an intersection in Minneapolis.

(BRANDON BELL Getty Images)

A ballooning Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget. Hiring bonuses of $50,000. Swelling ranks of ICE officers, to 22,000, in an expanding national force bigger than most police departments in America.

President Trump promised the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, but achieving his goal wouldn't have been possible without funding from the big tax and spending cuts bill passed by Republicans in Congress, and it’s fueling unprecedented immigration enforcement actions in cities such as Minneapolis and beyond.

The GOP's big bill is “supercharging ICE,” one budget expert said, in ways that Americans may not fully realize — and that have only just begun.

“I just don’t think people have a sense of the scale,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress and a former advisor to the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget.

“We're looking at ICE in a way we've never seen before,” he said.

Big bill creates a massive force

As the Republican president begins the second year of his second term, the immigration enforcement and removal operation that has been a cornerstone of his domestic and foreign policy agenda is rapidly transforming into something else — a national law enforcement presence with billions upon billions of dollars in new spending from U.S. taxpayers.