The Case for Keeping ICE and CBP Defunded
Senate Democrats, somewhat to my surprise, have held the line and refused to support funding the Department of Homeland Security in budget negotiations, and so funding ran out on Friday. As my colleague Robert Kuttner reports, Democrats offered Republicans a bargain of funding everything else in the department except ICE and CBP as negotiations continued on immigration enforcement reforms, but they refused.
Now, this does not mean ICE and CBP now have no money. The agencies got a tremendous one-off dollop as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, which gave ICE, at $75 billion, more than seven times its annual budget and more money than any military in the world except for China’s and America’s. CBP received tens of billions of dollars in its own right. And both agencies can draw on this money to continue operations during a shutdown.
That said, denying baseline annual funding is still a substantial cut for ICE and CBP, and the longer it persists, the deeper the funding reduction will be. Democrats should stick to this line. As long as Trump is in office, these agencies should get no funding through the traditional budget whatsoever. After all, they already have more than they need.
As an initial matter, Republicans have already pulled exactly this same move with the IRS. The Inflation Reduction Act had $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS, both to help the agency modernize its severely outdated IT infrastructure and also to conduct resource-intensive audits of rich people.
Republicans were absolutely apoplectic about this, because a large share of GOP voters and donors, and the party’s appointees and staff, as well as Republican elected officials themselves, are wealthy tax cheats. So when the GOP won control of the House in 2022, each time the budget process came up they demanded a pound of IRS flesh from the normal appropriation, thus canceling out a chunk of the extra cash. As my colleague David Dayen explained last month, after several rounds of this, just $10 billion of the funding is left. Lo, there was much rejoicing from the nation’s right-wing boat dealership owners, who could make their fraudulent deductions in peace.
Denying baseline funding effectively claws back the Republican ICE and CBP surge. Each year erodes the reserve of funding, and reduces the sums available to continue the nationwide terror campaign.
Aside from that precedent, there is a much more important issue at stake here. Many moderate Dems have sounded characteristically squeamish about ICE and CBP funding, because they simply assume that there has to be some kind of immigration enforcement agency. What are we going to do, simply let anyone who shows up roll off the boat at Ellis Island, have some half-literate border officer change their name from Płażyński to Preston, and immediately give them a factory job? Truly, it would be a crime against American history.
Setting aside my sarcasm and what immigration law enforcement should look like—nothing like ICE in my view, even before it got MAGA-fied—it is simply inarguable that neither ICE nor CBP is currently engaged in immigration law enforcement. This is Donald Trump’s fascist paramilitary.
Just consider how Minneapolis became the target of MAGA occupation. A dim-witted right-wing YouTube guy got fed a bunch of racist lies about Somali Americans by Minnesota Republican officials, and he made a video clumsily repeating the lies, principally by pretending there is something highly suspicious about a day care refusing to let a pack of strange men come in to “see the children.” Then that video got artificially boosted on social media algorithms, above all Elon Musk’s Twitter/X. That stoked the requisite frenzy to justify violent aggression.
Neither ICE nor CBP has jurisdiction over welfare fraud, and they are not equipped to investigate it even if they did. About 91 percent of Somali Americans are citizens, and most of the rest are legal residents. The welfare nonsense was a pretext to conduct a campaign of terror against a city that is overwhelmingly anti-Trump. Thousands of people have been kidnapped, thousands more have been intimidated, beaten, gassed—or in the cases of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, slaughtered like animals. Many people are too terrified of being black-bagged to leave their homes; as I wrote last week, this is causing severe economic damage to local families and businesses.
The ICE/CBP mob is Donald Trump’s Sturmabteilung. This is his squadristi. Violent thugs beating and murdering leftists and disfavored minorities has always been core to fascism. Italian fascists were the first to develop such paramilitary squadrismo tactics after the First World War, and as historian Robert Paxton wrote, Mussolini “made his Blackshirts available for action against socialists as well as against the South Slavs of Fiume and Trieste.”
I speculated way back in 2016 that local police might serve as Trump’s paramilitary, but it turns out federal police are the real thing.
If one accepts that argument, then it hardly needs to be argued that ICE and CBP should be defunded until Trump leaves office, after which they should be dismantled immediately. Should the German Social Democrats have voted to fund the Gestapo in 1933 out of fear that the border might get unruly?
But there are other arguments as well. If we look at this from the centrist end of the telescope, ICE and CBP should be defunded because they aren’t doing their jobs. If immigration enforcement is an important task, it is going undone. Instead, the Trump administration is wasting tens of billions of dollars kidnapping people semi-randomly, many of them legal residents or even U.S. citizens. The appalling nature of this has led thousands of Department of Justice lawyers to quit their jobs, and the resulting flood of lawsuits has totally overwhelmed the ones that remain. Basic functions of federal law enforcement have collapsed in favor of a psychotic effort to deport people like an Irish drywall contractor who has lived here legally for 20 years and is married to an American woman.
Even if you accept that some police force must maintain order at the border and perform all of the other tasks given to ICE, like customs inspection, it’s plain as day that they already have enough money to do that. If Tom Homan is to be believed that ICE is leaving Minneapolis, with future operations geared only toward targeted enforcement, what does ICE need an extra $75 billion reserve for? The easiest way to draw that money down is to deny baseline funding for the duration of Trump’s term.
If and when Trump and his fascist goons are thrown out of office, we can iron out a badly needed reform to the immigration system. Until then, it is madness to continue giving money to agencies that are in an undeclared war on the American people.
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