ANALYSIS: ICE’s 70 billion — Trump’s deportation machine, funded through 2029

Maxime Marquette

2026-06-27 15:58:19

The Exact Breakdown of the Secure America Act

The Secure America Act is not a complex document—as several correspondents in Washington have reported, it is a bill of barely a dozen pages, lacking the safeguards and guidelines typically required in federal legislation. The allocation is as follows: $38 billion for ICE, $26 billion for CBP (border patrol), and a $5 billion discretionary fund controlled directly by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. These funds are available through September 30, 2029, with no strict restrictions on the pace of spending—unlike regular annual budgets, there is no rule requiring the funds to be spent within a single fiscal year.

Of the $38 billion allocated to ICE, more than $31 billion is earmarked for domestic operations: immigration enforcement personnel, cooperation with local law enforcement through the highly controversial 287(g) agreements, government attorneys to argue deportation cases, transportation costs for repatriations, technological upgrades, and maintenance of facilities and vehicles. The remainder funds what the text euphemistically refers to as “mission-essential expenses” in jurisdictions that do not actively cooperate with ICE—a budget of at least $350 million specifically targeted against sanctuary cities.

The Historic Scale of Cumulative Funding

To gauge the magnitude of this upheaval, it is important to consider the historical figures. ICE’s budget for fiscal year 2024 was $9.9 billion. In the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, this budget has nearly tripled on an annualized basis—and even more so if one accounts for the ability to rapidly spend multiyear appropriations. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the effective annual budget now available to ICE exceeds $28 billion, making it the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States—surpassing the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, and all other federal security agencies combined. Congress has also allocated an additional $22 billion to CBP through the Secure America Act, bringing the total budget for border security to unprecedented levels.

What strikes me about these figures is not so much their size as the logic behind them. You don’t spend $240 billion over four years to “secure” a border. You do it to build a permanent infrastructure of a repressive state—buildings, aircraft, long-term contracts, biometric databases—that will outlive Trump himself. That is the true nature of this investment.

Detention centers: warehouses turned into mass camps

The network of 24 new facilities

Even before the Secure America Act was signed, ICE had already launched a massive program to build detention centers, funded by billions from the One Big Beautiful Bill of July 2025. According to documents obtained by the government and forwarded to Senator Kelly Ayotte’s office in February 2026, ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion to acquire and renovate 24 warehouses across the United States — 16 regional processing centers with a capacity of 1,000 to 1,500 people each, and 8 “mega-centers” capable of housing up to 10,000 people simultaneously. These facilities are scheduled to be operational by November 30, 2026. ICE has already purchased warehouses in Social Circle, Georgia, for $129 million; in Hagerstown, Maryland, for over $100 million; in Surprise, Arizona, for over $70 million; in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, for $87 million; and near El Paso, Texas, for $123 million.

The operational logic of the system is as follows: an immigrant who is apprehended is first placed in a regional processing center for three to seven days, then transferred to one of the mega-centers, where they will remain in detention for an average of 60 days before being deported. By the end of January 2026, ICE was already detaining more than 72,000 people each night—nearly double the number recorded when Trump took office in January 2025. The stated goal is to reach a capacity of 99,000 beds per day in 2026 and 2027, and then to increase that to 100,000.

Conditions Condemned by Rights Organizations

The model of repurposed warehouses is criticized by public health experts and human rights advocates for one fundamental reason: these buildings were not designed to house thousands of people and will be difficult to ventilate properly, creating conditions conducive to the rapid spread of disease. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at Fort Bliss military base in Texas—a site that housed an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II—at least two active cases of tuberculosis and nearly 20 cases of COVID-19 have already been reported among detainees. Detainees have reported spoiled food, inadequate access to water, insufficient medical care, and physical abuse. Three people have died at this camp since it opened in August 2025, including one homicide. At the same time, ICE has relaxed its detention standards, officially to “reduce the burden” on private contractors—a decision denounced by experts as further eroding detainees’ legal protections.

Transforming industrial warehouses into mass detention facilities at lightning speed—without adequate infrastructure, without independent oversight, and while simultaneously relaxing detention standards—is a recipe for a humanitarian disaster. I’m not saying this to be alarmist. I’m saying it because the documented facts at Fort Bliss are already outlining what this means in practice for tens of thousands of human beings.

The Air Fleet: The ICE Acquires Its Own Deportation Planes

The Historic Purchase of Boeing 737s

One of the most symbolic changes in the architecture of the deportation system is the ICE’s decision to acquire its own fleet of deportation aircraft. Traditionally, the agency chartered flights from private contractors such as CSI Aviation or, briefly, from the commercial airline Avelo Airlines. Since December 2025, the DHS has had a contract with Daedalus Aviation—a company founded in Virginia in 2024—for the purchase of six Boeing 737s for approximately $140 million. In March 2026, documents from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) revealed that the total budget allocated for aircraft purchases had been increased to $464.5 million to acquire eight Boeing 737s and two Gulfstream G650 jets—often used as luxury business aircraft.

The agency justifies these purchases on the basis of supposed cost savings: according to the DHS spokesperson, owning its own fleet would save $279 million by operating “optimized flight routes.” But Democratic senators, notably Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have challenged the legality of these purchases, arguing that neither DHS nor ICE has the legislative authority to acquire aircraft—a decision that normally requires explicit authorization from Congress. Murphy has referred the matter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to obtain a legal opinion on the issue. Furthermore, one of the purchased aircraft—a $70 million Boeing 737-8 Max equipped with a bedroom featuring a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, a bar, and four large flat-screen TVs—appears designed more for the comfort of high-ranking officials than for transporting migrants being deported by the hundreds.

Record Numbers of Deportation Flights

Regardless of legal questions, the operational figures speak for themselves. According to Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor, ICE conducted a record 245 international deportation flights in April 2026, bound for 38 different countries. Between January 20, 2025, and October 31, 2025, the administration had already carried out 1,701 deportation flights to 77 countries. The use of military aircraft for deportations—a controversial practice since the start of the second term—preceded the acquisition of ICE’s own civilian fleet. Owning its own aircraft is intended to allow the agency to become more independent of logistical constraints and the objections of private partners who, like Avelo, may have decided to stop participating in deportation operations under public pressure.

A $70 million luxury deportation plane with a bedroom and a bar, purchased with funds taken from the budget for deporting migrants—this represents a moral dissonance so glaring that it goes beyond mere political criticism. This isn’t incompetence: it’s institutional arrogance. And no one in the administration has been held accountable for it.

The goal of one million evictions per year: an official and openly acknowledged figure

From Campaign Slogan to Documented Government Policy

What appeared to be an outlandish campaign promise has become an official goal enshrined in ICE’s budget documents submitted to Congress. The agency has formally declared that it has the “capacity” and the “commitment” to carry out one million returns and deportations per year. In particular, ICE has specified that it aims to have 99,000 active detention beds daily in 2026 and 2027, with a specific goal of 500,000 deportations of individuals with criminal records for each of those two years. The rest—the remaining half—consist of individuals without criminal records, some of whom have been living in the country for decades. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that 74% of people currently in ICE detention have no criminal history.

Recent data shows an exponential increase: deportations following arrest and detention by ICE increased fivefold between the second half of 2024 and January 2026, according to data from deportationdata.org. In less than a year of his second term, the daily number of detainees has risen from about 40,000 to more than 70,000. The Trump administration also revoked Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some 1.6 million people, including Haitian and Venezuelan refugees, making them suddenly subject to deportation after sometimes years of legal residence in the United States.

A Push for 10,000 New Agents

To meet this goal of one million annual deportations, ICE plans to recruit 10,000 new agents using billions from the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Secure America Act also provides for signing, performance, and retention bonuses to attract and retain staff. ICE has also expanded the 287(g) agreements, which allow local law enforcement—county sheriffs and municipal police departments—to conduct immigration enforcement operations on behalf of and in collaboration with the federal agency. These agreements are highly controversial because they turn local police officers into immigration agents, blur the lines between ordinary law enforcement and federal immigration policy, and discourage immigrants—whether they are in the country legally or not—from reporting crimes to the police.

I recognize the political logic behind the one-million goal: Trump won in 2024 in part on this issue, and polls continue to show that American public opinion remains in favor of strict enforcement of immigration laws. But between “strict enforcement” and “building the infrastructure of a surveillance state and mass deportation system that will last well beyond Trump’s presidency”—there is a moral chasm that even advocates of a hard line should examine carefully.

The End of Surveillance: A State Above the Law

The Dismantling of Oversight Bodies

The unprecedented increase in ICE’s budget has been accompanied by an equally unprecedented weakening of oversight mechanisms. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the Trump administration effectively eliminated the Office of the Immigration Ombudsman and the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties just two months after the inauguration. Without these internal oversight bodies, there is no longer any government agency responsible for monitoring detention conditions, including compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act and its DHS counterpart. Members of Congress—who nevertheless have the legal right to inspect federal detention centers—have been denied access to several ICE facilities.

Furthermore, the new, more lenient detention standards implemented by ICE in June 2026—officially to “reduce the burden on operators”—have been criticized by experts such as the ACLU for reducing detainees’ legal protections while allowing private contractors to cut costs. In particular, facilities are prohibited from refusing to accept detainees sent by ICE, regardless of their health status or special needs. Another change prevents contractors from paying detainees more than the historic minimum of $1 per day for their work, a practice long challenged in court as tantamount to forced labor.

Contracts Without Competitive Bidding or Transparency

ICE has largely abandoned competitive bidding processes, preferring to award contracts without competitive bidding directly to the two major U.S. private prison operators: CoreCivic and the GEO Group. The GEO Group was thus awarded a 15-year, $1 billion no-bid contract to manage the Delaney Hall facility in Newark, New Jersey—a 1,000-bed facility. CoreCivic received a six-month contract to reopen a former 1,033-bed federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. These companies—whose stock prices have soared since the start of Trump’s second term—are enjoying an extraordinary windfall with long-term commitments funded by U.S. taxpayers, without any obligation for public transparency regarding housing conditions, as they are exempt from requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The combination of unlimited funding, no-bid contracts, eliminated oversight bodies, and FOIA exemptions for private operators—this is precisely the recipe that political science experts identify as characteristic of a repressive apparatus that places itself above ordinary democratic oversight. I’m not saying this is inevitably totalitarian. I’m saying this is the direction we’re heading in.

The One Big Beautiful Bill of 2025: The First Budgetary Shock

170 billion to lay the groundwork

To understand the Secure America Act of June 2026, one must first understand the One Big Beautiful Bill—the major tax and budget bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in July 2025. This legislation, which combined tax cuts with massive cuts to social programs, also allocated an unprecedented $170 billion over four years to immigration enforcement. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, this is more than the combined annual budget of all local and state law enforcement agencies in the United States. It is also more than the entire budget of the Department of Justice for the entire federal prison system, which houses 155,000 inmates.

Of that $170 billion, $75 billion went to ICE (approximately $18.7 billion per year over four years), including $45 billion specifically for the expansion of detention centers and $30 billion for arrest, detention, and deportation operations. This law enabled ICE to immediately recruit 12,000 additional agents, double its detention capacity in less than a year, and begin purchasing deportation aircraft. It is on top of this—already astronomical—figure that the Secure America Act of June 2026 adds an additional 70 billion.

Social Disparity: Billions for Deportation, Nothing for Families

In April 2026, the Center for American Progress published an analysis highlighting the absurdity of the allocation of budgetary priorities: while the Secure America Act allocated $70 billion to immigration enforcement, the Republican budget proposal set aside zero dollars to reduce healthcare, housing, or food costs for struggling American families. The same logic had prevailed in the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which funded the deportation machine by making more than $1,000 billion in cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs. For millions of Americans, the Trump administration’s priority is therefore clear: deporting immigrants is more important than caring for children.

I understand the political argument: Trump received an electoral mandate on immigration, and one can legitimately debate levels of legal immigration and law enforcement priorities. But funding mass detention centers by cutting care for sick children—that is a choice of values that even supporters of a hard line on immigration should find difficult to defend in the face of their own conscience.

The Reconciliation Process: Bypassing Deliberative Democracy

A tool designed for budgeting, used as a political weapon

The manner in which the Secure America Act was passed deserves special attention, as it illustrates a profound transformation of the U.S. legislative process. The budget reconciliation procedure was designed to allow Congress to pass fiscal measures by a simple majority—51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60 usually required to overcome a filibuster. It is supposed to be reserved for measures that have a direct impact on the federal budget. The Republicans used this procedure to fund immigration agencies for three years in advance, which allowed them to avoid not only the Democratic filibuster but also any bipartisan negotiation process. The Senate vote ended 52 to 47, with Senator Murkowski as the sole dissenting Republican.

The use of reconciliation for this multi-year funding is a deliberate political decision that goes beyond mere parliamentary strategy. As House Speaker Mike Johnson explained after the vote, the explicit goal was to deprive Democrats of their ability to cut funding for the remainder of the Trump administration: “By funding it for three years, we have stripped them of their ability to cut this funding or hold appropriations hostage for the remainder of the Trump administration.” This is a remarkably direct admission: the goal is not simply to fund agencies, but to make public policy irreversible for the duration of an entire term, by bypassing Congress’s constitutional authority over appropriations.

The Democratic opposition, lacking real power

The Democrats, who had staged a 75-day budget stalemate in an attempt to secure reforms—particularly in the wake of the deaths in Minneapolis—were left empty-handed. According to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Republican vote amounted to giving Donald Trump “an additional $70 billion check for his violent mass deportation machine—with no oversight, no accountability, and no safeguards.” NPR noted that even if Democrats regained control of Congress in the November 2026 midterm elections, their ability to enact changes through the regular appropriations process would now be blocked until 2029. The repressive apparatus is financially set in stone for the next three years, no matter what happens at the polls.

That is what concerns me most, deep down: it’s not that Trump has chosen to enforce immigration laws firmly—that is his constitutional right and his electoral mandate. It is that by funding this apparatus for three years without congressional oversight, he has effectively stripped American citizens of the ability to correct its excesses through normal democratic mechanisms. It is a structure that will endure long after he is gone.

The Impact on Communities: Fears That Paralyze

Detention Without Criminal Profiling

One of the most striking changes in ICE’s approach during Trump’s second term is the abandonment of any prioritization based on the criminal profile of those targeted. Under previous administrations—including Obama’s—ICE officially focused its resources on individuals with criminal records, “fugitives” already ordered to be deported, or repeat offenders. The current policy treats all undocumented immigrants as equally subject to detention and immediate deportation, regardless of their length of residence in the United States, their family ties to U.S. citizens, or the absence of any criminal history. The Brennan Center reports that today, 74% of people in ICE detention have no criminal record.

Among the 1.6 million people whose Temporary Protected Status (TPS) has been revoked are individuals who have been living legally in the United States for, in some cases, more than 20 years; essential workers with children born on U.S. soil; and patients with chronic conditions requiring ongoing medical care. The revocation of their TPS has suddenly made them “deportable” without any procedure other than the standard deportation process, which has been expedited within a judicial system that is itself overburdened. Immigration lawyers report that the speed at which cases are processed, combined with the distances between detention centers and courts, often makes it very difficult to provide effective legal representation to detainees.

Cities Resisting, a Federal Government Striking Back

Faced with the expansion of the deportation machine, several cities and states have attempted to resist. The governor of Massachusetts urged ICE to stop using a state airport for its deportation flights and asked private airlines not to participate in these operations. Local protests prevented a warehouse owner in Oklahoma City from selling his property to ICE to turn it into a detention center. Local elected officials in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Arizona have tried to oppose the federal agency’s acquisition of warehouses. But the Secure America Act explicitly includes $350 million to fund deportation operations in jurisdictions that “do not actively cooperate” with federal authorities—a measure clearly aimed at sanctuary cities.

There is something deeply paradoxical about the fact that the Trump administration is using public funds to finance operations specifically designed to punish cities that refuse to participate in its policies. In a functioning federal system, local governments have the right to set their own law enforcement priorities. Using the federal budget to undermine this local autonomy is an attack on the principles of federalism that Republicans claim to uphold.

The Industrial Complex of Deportation: Who Profits?

The Big Private Winners of Budgetary Militarization

The explosion in ICE’s budget has produced very tangible economic winners in the private sector. The two American giants of the private detention industry—CoreCivic and GEO Group—have seen their stock prices soar since the start of Trump’s second term. GEO Group revealed to its investors that it has 6,000 unused beds across six of its facilities, which, if all were in use, would represent more than $300 million in additional annualized revenue. The company is “prudently pursuing” new opportunities to acquire and manage warehouses converted into detention centers. CoreCivic secured a 24-month contract covering two facilities—including the infamous former Leavenworth Penitentiary—generating approximately $60 million in annual revenue. These companies benefit from long-term, taxpayer-funded contracts awarded without competitive bidding, with no obligation for public transparency.

The Brennan Center for Justice has dubbed this ecosystem the “deportation industrial complex”—a private-profit infrastructure built on human suffering, lacking quality control mechanisms and with little incentive to reduce costs or improve conditions. ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons, in fact, laid out this logic with disarming candor during a conference in April 2025, stating: “We have to treat this like a business… like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” The comparison speaks for itself.

Daedalus Aviation and the $464 Million Aircraft Fleet

Beyond detention center operators, the expansion of ICE’s aircraft fleet is also generating considerable financial flows. Daedalus Aviation, founded in Virginia as recently as 2024—the year before the ICE budget ballooned—was awarded the initial $140 million contract for the delivery of six Boeing 737s. The exact terms of the contract and this young company’s actual operational capacity to maintain and operate a fleet of this scale raise legitimate questions. The total budget, increased to $464.5 million by the OMB in March 2026 for ten aircraft, suggests a rapid expansion of a contract for which it remains unclear whether the deliverables will be met—especially since senators are challenging the very legality of these purchases.

A company founded in 2024 that lands a $140 million contract from the U.S. government just a few months later, without any apparent competitive bidding, amid the dismantling of oversight bodies—if this were happening in a country the West usually keeps a watchful eye on, it would be called institutional corruption or state-sponsored cronyism. Here, we call it operational efficiency.

A Historical Comparison: A Budget That Outshines Everything We've Seen Before

No democratic state has ever funded such a machine

To gauge the historic scale of the cumulative budgets allocated to ICE since July 2025, a few comparisons are in order. The ICE’s actual annual budget—approximately $28 billion according to the Brennan Center—now exceeds the combined budget of all U.S. local and state police forces. It exceeds the total budget of the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Marshals Service combined. It is greater than the Department of Justice’s budget for the entire federal prison system (155,000 inmates). It is several times the GDP of entire countries. No democratic state in history has ever devoted so many resources to a mass deportation operation targeting its own resident population.

The only comparable precedents in world history involve 20th-century authoritarian regimes—which no one, not even within the Trump administration, claims as a model. What the administration argues is that the size of the undocumented population in the United States—estimated at 11 to 14 million people—justifies commensurate resources. But even accepting this argument, the numbers remain staggering: achieving the goal of one million deportations per year would represent one of the largest population displacement operations organized by a democratic state since 1945.

The Endurance of the Infrastructure After Trump

One of the most underdiscussed aspects of this massive investment is its structural durability. The warehouses purchased will still exist after 2029. The aircraft purchased will still be flying after 2029. The biometric databases built will continue to operate after 2029. The 10,000 new agents recruited will remain in their positions after 2029. The multi-year contracts with CoreCivic and the GEO Group will remain in effect after 2029. Even if a democratic administration came to power in 2029, it would inherit a mass deportation infrastructure whose mere operating costs would be astronomical, and whose political dismantling would be extremely difficult. This may be the calculation that the architects of this policy have long been making: to create institutional realities that are as difficult to undo as possible.

This is what I’ve been trying to say since the beginning of this article: this isn’t just an immigration policy. It’s a project to permanently transform the U.S. government—its coercive capabilities, its relationship with a segment of its own resident population, and its structures of democratic oversight. Whether or not you agree with Trump’s immigration policy, this aspect deserves to be faced head-on.

Criticism of the West's Allies: A Matter of Values

The Concerns of European Partners

Within the Western world, Trump’s policy of mass deportations is viewed by European governments with a mixture of concern and bewilderment. While several European Union countries—including France, Italy, and the Netherlands—have themselves tightened their immigration policies in recent years, none has committed comparable resources to a mass deportation infrastructure that indiscriminately targets long-term residents with no criminal record. The European Commission and several Members of the European Parliament have expressed concerns about whether ICE’s detention practices comply with international human rights standards, particularly the Convention Against Torture and UNHCR standards on the detention of asylum seekers.

There is a real tension here for advocates of a united and strong West in the face of its common adversaries: an aggressive Russia, an expansionist China, a nuclear Iran, and an unpredictable North Korea. These threats exist and are real. The West must remain the center of the world, and to do so, it must remain strong and consistent in its values. Yet a West that builds mass detention camps for its own residents, that dismantles independent oversight bodies, that excludes lawmakers from legal inspection procedures—such a West offers its adversaries a formidable ideological weapon: proof that liberal democracies are incapable of defending their stated values in the face of pressure from national political passions.

Trump as a Necessary Evil: How Far Does This Logic Hold Up?

The “necessary evil” argument applied to Trump rests on the idea that firm enforcement of immigration laws—including unpopular and radical measures—was necessary to put an end to a real crisis, and that Trump alone had the political will to impose it. This argument has a certain logic to it. The levels of irregular immigration reached under the Biden administration did indeed represent a real governance challenge, and the weakness of institutional responses had fueled a crisis of confidence in the ability of democratic states to control their borders. On this point, Trump’s firmness had a relevance that it would be dishonest to deny. But the logic of the “necessary evil” has a limit: it assumes that the evil remains proportionate to the necessity. A $240 billion budget, a permanent infrastructure for mass deportation, the elimination of independent oversight—this goes far beyond what the logic of “necessity” can justify.

I have long wrestled intellectually with this question: Can one defend a strong West while criticizing the way one of its most powerful members treats its residents? My answer today is yes—and it is even an obligation. Because the West’s strength is not merely military or economic. It is moral. And we squander that moral strength when we build unsupervised megacamps, purchase luxury aircraft with deportation funds, and eliminate mechanisms of democratic oversight.

The American Public's Response: Between Approval and Concern

A Popular Mandate on Immigration, but Less-Well-Received Restrictions

U.S. polls reveal a nuanced reality that both supporters and opponents of Trump’s policies tend to oversimplify. A relative majority of Americans supports, in principle, the strict enforcement of immigration laws and the deportation of individuals with criminal records or pending deportation orders. It was on this basis that Trump won the 2024 election with a significant share of the Latino vote, including from certain communities directly affected by his policies. But the same public opinion polls show much lower levels of support for detaining immigrants without criminal records, for dismantling oversight mechanisms, and for astronomical spending on detention infrastructure at the expense of social programs.

The key political issue for the November 2026 midterm elections will be whether Republicans manage to maintain the “security and law enforcement” framing on immigration, or whether Democrats succeed in bringing the documented realities of detention conditions, the lack of oversight, and the astronomical cost to taxpayers into the public consciousness. The multi-year funding of the Secure America Act was specifically designed to prevent this debate from having practical consequences—even if the Democrats were to win in November, they would not be able to cut funding until 2029.

The Midterm Elections as a Symbolic Stakes

The NPR noted in its analysis of the vote on the Secure America Act that even if polls were to turn in the Democrats’ favor on Trump’s immigration policies, their ability to enact changes through the budget process would now be blocked until 2029. This is a cynical but politically rational calculation: allowing voters to punish the immigration policy at the polls in November, while ensuring that this punishment cannot translate into actual policy change. It is a form of shielding public policy from ordinary democratic corrective mechanisms—a “deportation machine” that is not only funded but also locked in place.

Ultimately, what is at stake here goes beyond immigration policy. It is the question of whether American democratic institutions are robust enough to withstand an administration that is methodically using them to lock in its own policies against future democratic correction. I do not have the answer. But I know that the answer to this question will be one of the most important of the decade for the entire West.

Conclusion: an immovable and financially unshakable expulsion machine

The Results of a Radical Transformation

In less than eighteen months of his second term, Donald Trump has transformed ICE in the most radical way in its history. An agency with an annual budget of $9.9 billion in 2024 now has an effective budget of $28 billion per year—a threefold increase. It is recruiting 10,000 new agents, building a network of 24 new detention centers capable of holding up to 100,000 people simultaneously, acquiring its own fleet of ten deportation planes, and has officially included in its budget documents the goal of one million deportations per year. This entire apparatus is funded for the duration of the term—and beyond—through two successive laws totaling more than 240 billion dollars, passed without any Democratic support via the reconciliation process, and made virtually irreversible before 2029 due to their multi-year funding structure.

From a democratic standpoint, the elimination of internal oversight bodies, the awarding of no-bid contracts to private operators exempt from the FOIA, and the de-prioritization of congressional oversight create a largely opaque state apparatus that eludes ordinary mechanisms of control. Hakeem Jeffries has referred to it as “a deportation machine without oversight, without accountability, without safeguards.” The phrase is controversial, but the documented facts give it real substance. This is not merely an immigration policy: it is a profound restructuring of the U.S. government’s coercive structures, the effects of which will be felt far beyond Trump’s own term in office.

What the West Must Take Away

For the West’s allies—in Europe, Canada, and Australia—the American experience offers an ambiguous lesson. On the one hand, a firm approach to enforcing immigration laws is not in itself incompatible with democratic values, and several aspects of Trump’s policies addressed real governance challenges. On the other hand, the transformation of this firm stance into a permanent state apparatus—funded outside the scope of ordinary democratic oversight and with the elimination of oversight mechanisms—evokes dynamics that liberal democracies have learned the hard way not to take for granted. The West remains the center of the world and must remain so—but its strength lies precisely in its ability to uphold its values even under pressure. That ability is what is at stake today in the mega-camps being built in warehouses across Georgia, Maryland, and Texas.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist