Over the past several months, the nation has been focused on the fierce debate over Donald Trump and the Republican party’s proposed federal budget, which Congress passed on July 3 and the president signed into law on July 4. That budget was widely condemned and opposed for its deep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, the SNAP food assistance program and other social safety net programs, while offering the wealthiest Americans huge tax cuts.
But a closer look at the Trump-GOP budget finds that $170 billion has been allocated to federal immigration enforcement and border security, that provides the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) funds they will now use to hire 10,000 new ICE agents and carry out Trump’s aggressive mass deportation campaign. Masked ICE agents will now certainly ramp up their abductions targeting both undocumented immigrants of color, and international university students who espouse political views now unconstitutionally outlawed by the Trump regime.
With their new funding ICE will become the nation’s largest law enforcement agency as dozens of new detention centers are built to hold hundreds of thousands of immigrants awaiting deportation, often without due process. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation magazine, who talks about how the enormous infusion of new funds for ICE will enable Trump to move toward imposing his dystopian vision for a repressive American police state.
CHRIS LEHMANN: So this bill sets aside $150 billion to go into the Homeland Security and ICE budget. And just to give people a sense of the scale of this increase right now, ICE’s annual budget is a little over $3 billion. So that’s an increase of 365 percent in spending on ICE. That’s a figure that is bigger than what had been the total budget for the USAID, the Agency for International Development. It’s larger than the combined funding for all 50 federal prisons in the country. So it’s a massive increase and it’s going into this agency that is now conducting these brazen — basically, kidnappings, detention and rendition sometimes to third countries. And a horrible federal facility in El Salvador where (Kilmar) Abrego Garcia was detained and reportedly subject to conditions that amount to torture. Tom Homan, so-called immigration czar under Trump, said this budget will result in 10,000 more ICE agents being hired.
And these are the agents we’ve seen in coverage in Los Angeles and elsewhere that just show up masked, without identification and apprehend people who are college students who may be protesting the Gaza war, people who are not charged with any crimes. It’s not hyperbole to say these are the conditions East Germans lived under the Stasi government where there was a state committed to total surveillance and midnight apprehension of citizens on bogus or no charges. Yeah.
This is something that people should be really paying close attention to as the administration continues to step up its mass deportation campaign. Under Steven Miller, they have this target of 3,000 deportations a day, which they’re not hitting by conventional means because they’ve shut down the border. So it’s this ridiculous quota they’ve imposed that has resulted in these wilding raids by ICE agents to sweep anyone who they think just looks like they could be in the country illegally.
SCOTT HARRIS: There’s an issue you wrote about in your article where the Department of Homeland Security has a plan now to create a searchable national citizenship database. And I wondered if you talk about the threat that poses to a democracy.
CHRIS LEHMANN: Now I’m sounding to many of your listeners like a hair-on-fire alarmist, but it is a great threat indeed. And we have never had a searchable national database of all American citizens because I think historically we have had a healthy distrust and we know from sort of bitter experience what happens when a racially-minded administration gets a hold of information and records of people they review as dangerous outsiders.
It happened during the first Red Scare in the 1920s when masses of European immigrants were sent back or expelled from the country for their political beliefs. That happened during the internment camps that the Roosevelt administration created in California in the West Coast right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor where Japanese citizens were rounded up. We have seen this movie before and we know, we should know the grave risks that come with something like this.
And this is a project that happened when ICE was doing its sort of multi-level raid on the federal government and set up a program with the Social Security Administration to create this database of people with Social Security Numbers and classifying them either as citizens or undocumented immigrants or God knows what. I mean, that’s the thing under this administration. They have lied consistently about what immigrants are doing in this country and in reality there is no immigrant violent crime wave.
The reason they have Social Security Numbers is they are paying into the system and if they are undocumented, they’re not drawing out benefits. They are giving a massive subsidy to this government program. They are contributing, as we’ve seen with Trump backing off of raids at farms and hotels and other workplaces, they contribute massively to the American economy. Congressional Budget Office estimate released last year put the contribution of immigrants to the overall American economy over the next 10 years at $10 trillion.
SCOTT HARRIS: Wow.
CHRIS LEHMANN: Trillion with “T”. So when all of this rhetoric you hear from the MAGA right about how we are under invasion from this unchecked wave of immigrants, again, that is also a lie. The larger point is in my mind there is no model of an invasion where the invaders give you $10 trillion. And what’s frustrating, I also noted my piece for The Nation is, the Democrats as on so many other issues are on their back heels on immigration. Many Democrats on Capitol Hill voted for the Laken Riley Act in the first days of the Trump administration, which is the mechanism by which ICE agents are now rounding up people who aren’t charged with crimes. It is a disastrous piece of legislation and Democrats supported it.
And the same goes for the equally disastrous immigration bill that the Republicans put together and Trump told everyone to disown. Last year, Democrats were wildly supportive of that measure. So they’re not offering a robust, compelling alternative based on what the real facts of the issue are. And that’s how we get in this kind of demagogic death grip of MAGA lies and what is now a MAGA police state.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Chris Lehmann (17:35) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter to get updates to our “Hey AmeriKKKa, It’s Not Normal” compilation.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.
