President Trump’s budget requests an additional $4.5 billion for unnecessary immigration enforcement expansion, a 23% increase over immigration enforcement spending in 2016. The request would exponentially increase the number of immigrants languishing in unjust detention and waste billions on a costly and dangerous expansion of immigration enforcement and border militarization.

Specific increases in Department of Homeland Security funding which concern FCNL include:

• A 66% increase in immigration detention. President Trump requested $1.5 billion to maintain 51,379 beds, well above and beyond the 34,000 beds previously authorized by Congress.
• Increase the deportation force by 1,500. The request includes $300 million to hire 1,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to patrol U.S. communities. It also includes money for 500 new Border Patrol agents, for a total of 20,258 agents. Customs and Border Protection has struggled to hire qualified agents to meet the current level and has proposed to lower hiring standards to expedite the process. Watering down CBP hiring standards risks employing CBP officers and agents who could jeopardize national security and community safety; there is a history of agents who have been prone to corruption, collusion with international drug trafficking organizations, or abuses of power through excessive force or sexual assault.
• A $2.6 billion down-payment for the wall and increased militarization of border communities including sensors, towers, and drones. Barriers and militarization along the southern border have proven ineffective, costly, harmful for the environment, and dangerous for human and civil rights.
• $15 million increase to expand mandatory E-Verify. Absent of programmatic and immigration policy reforms, E-Verify will continue to hurt immigrants, employers, and U.S. workers alike. The current system is intrusive to privacy, rampant with errors which slows down the process of hiring, leads to increased discrimination, and leaves individuals with few avenues to contest false results.

The budget also increases funding for the Department of Justice to “combat illegal immigration” requesting:

• 60 additional attorneys to criminally prosecute migrants. Criminal prosecutions for entry and re-entry already make up over half of the all federal prosecutions, a gross misallocation of federal law enforcement resources. The emphasis on criminal prosecution comes at the expense of legal orientation programs and accessible legal aid to help migrants successfully navigate the asylum and immigration systems. Our government resources should be ensuring all people have full access to the justice system rather than reinforcing a system that leads to more mass incarceration.
• 20 attorneys to strip landowners from their land, in order to build additional barriers and wall along the southern border.
• 75 additional immigration judge teams. FCNL is supportive of an increase in judge teams (an immigration judge and seven court staffers), but troubled by the framing that these teams would “bolster and more efficiently adjudicate removal proceedings”. Judge teams must not act on behalf of the deportation apparatus, but as qualified, impartial reviewers of individual cases.

The budget request is falsely predicated on the notion that immigrants are a burden to U.S. communities and seeks to further ingrain unjust aspects of the U.S. immigration system. But Congress has the “power of the purse” – now is your chance to tell your members of Congress to live up to our shared values and scale back funds for endless immigration enforcement until immigration laws are adequately reformed.