Trump bill raises budget of Stephen Miller’s Gestapo many times over

This aspect of the Big Fascist Bill isn’t getting enough attention:

Under the House Judiciary bill, ICE would be given $45 billion to spend on detention through September 30, 2029. This would be a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis over ICE’s current $3.4 billion detention budget, putting ICE’s annual detention budget at $12.4 billion. By contrast, the federal Bureau of Prisons currently has a budget of $8.3 billion, meaning that Congress could give ICE a budget for detention that is nearly 50% larger than the entire federal prison system. 

The budget would also provide ICE $14.4 billion for transportation and removal operations, an astronomic 500% annual increase from the current $721 million provided in the current budget. Along with this funding would come eight billion dollars to hire 10,000 new ICE officers over the next five years, as well as $858 million for retention and signing bonuses and $600 million to hire sufficient human resources personnel to carry out that level of mass hiring.  

At the same time as Congress seeks to ramp up detention, arrests, and removals, it would give a measly 30% increase to the immigration court budget. This raises the serious possibility that ICE would build detention centers faster than judges could come on board to reduce backlogs. As a result, people would be held in detention for longer periods of time without any hearings, as the courts could not keep up with the rapid growth of the enforcement system.  

Along with these historic increases to immigration enforcement funding, the bill would also reshape immigration benefits by imposing mandatory fees for multiple applications. For the first time, the United States would charge people to apply for asylum — with the fee set at an unwaivable $1,000 minimum. This alone would effectively eliminate asylum as an option for unaccompanied children and asylum seekers held in detention who have no money or access to work opportunities. But even asylum applicants outside of detention would struggle to pay these fees, as the bill would mandate that asylum applicants applying for work permits must pay $550 every 6 months to get and keep a work permit, as well as an additional $100 fee every year the application remains pending. 

Under this new system, an asylum applicant who had to wait five years to get a decision in our heavily backlogged asylum system would have to pay as much as $7,000 in fees to get a decision; $1,000 for the application, $550 every six months for a work permit, and $500 for the five years the application was pending. And if the decision was negative, the House Judiciary bill would make the person pay $900 to appeal, up from the current $110 fee. 

Who voted for this scum? This guy:

The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money.

“Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.”

JJ took a breath.

“It needed to be done,” JJ said, softly, because he was also a Republican who, like nearly every farmer he knew, thought the country wasted too much money.

“But not all of it,” JJ said, because he rejected the notion that his grant was a waste. . . .

“I tried to do things right,” JJ said, because he could have taken on an undocumented laborer at any time for $14 an hour, as many of his neighbors had, but he didn’t believe in supporting illegal immigration. Almost nothing mattered more to him than his word, and he’d kept it to the U.S. government: He’d committed to buy a plane ticket for a 24-year-old from Guatemala named Otto Vargas. He’d rented him a single-wide. He’d bought him an old pickup to use. He’d spent tens of thousands of dollars to do what the grant required, covering most of it with a line of credit at 8.5 percent interest.

Now, he didn’t know if Otto would ever get here, or if the government would ever pay him back.

JJ had joined 81 percent of Yuma County’s voters in supporting Trump, whom he considered the better of two bad options. He wanted to believe that the president would honor his many pledges to do right by people like him.

“The USA will PROTECT OUR FARMERS!!!” Trump had posted to Truth Social that very day. . . .

In the months after applying, he bought a 2012 combine, a 2013 planter, a 2013 corn header, a 2000 Dodge pickup meant for Otto and a second hay stacker, the only new piece of equipment he’d ever owned. JJ paid cash as much as he could but still owed more than $380,000. At the time, it didn’t scare him, because with Otto, the grant money, the farmhand he already had and the extra margin he’d pocket from owning his machinery, JJ figured he could pay it all off in three years.

His investments spoke to the value that even one dependable worker can bring to today’s farms, where more than 40 percent of the workforce is undocumented. To address the critical shortage of labor and stem the flow of undocumented immigrants, the U.S. Agriculture Department unveiled the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program in 2023. With the grant, farms could bring on foreign workers through the H-2A visa program and, in exchange, provide good working conditions.

“I’ve employed Americans, and they quit after a few days,” said Tracy Vinz, assured $400,000 for her organic farm in Wisconsin. “They quit after a few hours.”

“I’ve had a couple who didn’t even last a whole day,” said Mitch Lawson, a Georgia produce farmer who lost nearly two dozen American employees before he qualified for $200,000.

America — meaning the real America — trusted Donald Trump to do what he said he would do.

Think about that for a second.