ICE is siphoning billions while American families struggle to afford the basics
ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is spending huge buckets of taxpayer dollars, separating families and traumatizing children. And the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation scheme is worsening the affordability crisis, as Americans struggle to pay for basics.
Last week, ICE agents shot and wounded a man in New York City while he was in his car with his five-year-old child in the back seat.
Photo Credit Rise and Resist Andy Ratto
I have been covering a new ICE facility for unaccompanied migrant children set to open at an airport in Louisiana, and have felt compelled to amplify demands made by community members in Alexandria, LA, to cancel the ICE contracts.
While the Louisiana ICE facility for kids is atrocious beyond words, the New York City ICE shooting feels personal to me.
I’m from New York City. My grandfather was one of several siblings whose parents packed them up to flee Russian pogroms around the turn of the 20th Century. The family landed in New York City. As many immigrants do, my grandfather learned the food service business.
Eventually, he opened his own restaurant in the Rose Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. I have sweet childhood memories of sitting at a table with my grandfather in his restaurant, drinking Cokes adorned with maraschino cherries.
But is my grandfather’s immigration story, coming to the U.S. as a boy with his parents to escape violence and abuse, really any different from that of immigrant families now who are escaping oppressive conditions – with parents trying to keep their kids safe?
ICE is Targeting Kids
White House senior advisor Stephen Miller is “directing a whole-of-government approach that has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term and is targeting a vulnerable population of undocumented children. Many abruptly find themselves denied access to legal immigration pathways in the US, with their applications fast-tracked and then rejected before being forced out of the country,” the Guardian reported.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told me in a statement earlier this month, as I reported for the Queen Zone:
“Since the day he took office Donald Trump has been going out of his way to endanger migrant children and leave them at risk of falling into horrific cycles of trafficking and other abuse,” Wyden said. “I’m extremely concerned that the new ICE detention facility planned for construction in Louisiana will be another black box location for the Trump administration to disappear migrant children with no oversight and no accountability.”
Sen. Wyden also posted on Bluesky:
“The administration that continues to cover up for pedophiles simply cannot be trusted with the care of hundreds of unaccompanied children with no oversight and no transparency.”
I first reached out to ICE in July, following up on this AP reporting: “The official contractor for the new ICE holding facility will be the company’s nonprofit arm, the LaSalle Family Foundation.”
I asked ICE: “Why is the contractor the nonprofit arm and not the for-profit entity, LaSalle Corrections? How will services rendered by the foundation fit its statement of ‘charitable activities’?”
An ICE spokesperson emailed me in response, emphasizing semantics, saying the facility is to be called a “staging center.” The ICE spox included a pictorial list of five immigrants who, they claimed, were convicted criminals and arrested in Louisiana.
But as of this writing, ICE has not addressed my questions about unaccompanied children to be held at and deported from the new Alexandria facility – and none of the five photos they sent me were of kids.
The Marshall Project reported this month showing that ICE has arrested 8592 children during Trump’s second term.
“Lawyers for immigrant families said many of the children being arrested have been in the country for years, and are traumatically torn away from their friends, family and homes,” reported the Guardian.
Project Salt Box, which tracks government spending on ICE contracts, reported last month that the Trump administration is scouting multiple contractors to house up to 3000 migrant children each.
And ICE is not only rounding up immigrant kids.
ProPublica reports At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
Follow the Money
Lindsay Koshgarian, Program Director of the National Priorities Project, spoke with me about the Trump administration funding ICE instead of programs that help Americans afford the basics.
“Their priorities couldn’t be clearer,” she said. “Taking us back to July of 2025, Trump passed his ‘big, beautiful bill’. In that bill was $170 billion for his nasty deportation and detention agenda. And in that same bill were cuts to Medicaid, which insures almost one in five Americans with health insurance.”
The bill also included cuts to food stamps. “We all know food prices are at an all time high right now and not going down,” she said. The bill “was basically a shift of money from programs to help struggling Americans trying to get by to mass deportation and detention.”
Since passage of the bill, there’s been even more money going to ICE and CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection). “We’ve been tracking it. We’re now at $269 billion,” Koshgarian said.
Photo credit Irwin Kroot
In June, the National Immigrant Justice Center released a statement, signed by 107 organizations, urging Congress not to allocate additional funds to ICE and CPB. In a press release titled: “Taxpayers Are Note ICE’s Cash Cow,” they wrote:
“There is no end to ICE’s greed and waste of taxpayer funds. Americans are increasingly struggling to make ends meet while Congress works to pour billions of dollars into this administration’s cruel anti-immigrant agenda,” and “Sending another blank check to ICE makes a mockery of the affordability crisis Americans face.”
On June 9, Congress granted an additional $70 billion to the Trump administration for mass detention and deportation. The Institute for Policy Studies reported:
“As Heidi Altman and Ben D’Avanzo write, the new ICE funding law should be called the ICE First, Families Last Act because it prioritizes Trump’s mass deportation agenda and neglects a primary concern of families in the United States: the cost of living crisis. Not only does this law avoid addressing what people need to get by, such as rent, groceries, electric bills, and medical bills, this law places ICE and Border Patrol further above the law.”
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee told me in a statement last week:
“It is shameful that Congressional Republicans gave ICE and Border Patrol an additional $70 billion while the agencies sat on about $95 billion in unspent funds.
“As the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, I will keep fighting back against Trump’s unchecked power and blank checks to ICE and CBP agents which are continuing to operate as unchecked secret police.
“The funds should be redirected to deliver for hardworking families.”
How ICE is worsening the affordability crisis
A new report released last week by the ACLU and AFL-CIO outlines how mass deportations are damaging the economy: “Trump’s Deportation Agenda Is Making the Affordability Crisis Worse.” According to the report:
“The Trump administration’s deportation agenda is destabilizing communities across the nation, costing billions of taxpayer dollars, at a time when working families can’t afford groceries, childcare, rent, gas, and other essentials. According to recent polling, 95 percent of Americans believe there is an affordability crisis in the United States. But our economy isn’t just failing because of inflation and broken supply chains. The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is also largely to blame.”
Koshgarian said of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda, “You can’t tell the story without talking about racism.”
The Trump administration’s assault on immigrants is rooted in the Great Replacement Theory – a baseless conspiracy theory deployed by racists saying immigrants are taking jobs and influence away from white Americans.
Koshgarian said, “I think [the anti-immigrant agenda] is also driven by a total misreading and misunderstanding of the economy and how the economy works. How the economy works is you take jobs away from these people, and everybody loses.”
Koshgarian is hopeful that the taxpayer dollars not already spent can be clawed back and delivered to American families. “If the money is not spent, there’s a rescissions process available to Congress,” she said. “And billions upon billions of dollars are not yet spent. “The goal should be to claw back that money and use it where it is needed.”
Voters Are Against Spending on ICE
This is licensed under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License. Photo Credit Fibonacci Blue
A recent poll queried voters who were given information about the amount of money allocated toward the U.S. government’s mass deportation efforts — $269 billion — and given arguments for and against the spending.
60 percent of voters agree that the mass deportation budget is a misuse of taxpayer money, while only 30 percent of voters think it is appropriate.
Conclusion
At the start of this year, Ryan C. Smith wrote an article for the New Republic, saying, “If Democrats want to ease the affordability crisis, they’ll campaign on reining in the paramilitary force that’s making everything more expensive.” He wrote:
“Our society’s reliance on immigrant labor to keep the cost of food down doesn’t stop at the production end. In the words of the late, great Anthony Bourdain, Mexican and Central American immigrants are “the backbone of the [restaurant] industry,” who made up “most of the people in my experience cooking, preparing your food.”
In the future I imagine for a better America, I envision grandchildren of today’s immigrants sitting with their grandparents, enjoying cherry Cokes.
Also by Nancy Levine Stearns:
- New ICE Facility for Migrant Children Raises Alarm Over Trafficking Risks
- DEI Isn’t Dying: These Companies Are Standing Strong Against ‘Anti-Woke’ Backlash in 2025
- Shareholders of companies worth $13 trillion vote unanimously to defeat anti-DEI proposals
- Elon Musk’s Free Speech App Isn’t So Free: Why X Froze My Account and Banned Ken Klippenstein
You may want to read:
- Deported to a Country You’ve Never Been To?
- ICE’s New Rule Raises Grave Questions and Leaves Immigrants With Few Answers
- Know Your Rights: Official Hotlines to Report ICE or DHS Abuse
