Republicans are on the brink of handing President Trump an enormous injection of money to fund his hard-line immigration agenda. The “big beautiful bill,” which is facing what could be its final legislative hurdle in the House of Representatives, includes roughly $170 billion in additional funding to supercharge Trump’s mass deportation efforts and ramp up border security.
While there are ongoing debates within the GOP over what should go in the final package, none of those disagreements have centered around immigration funding, which was virtually unchanged between the Senate and House versions of the bill. The mega-bill would empower the Trump administration to build new immigration detention facilities, hire thousands more immigration officers, construct new sections of Trump’s long-promised border wall and pour billions of dollars into other aspects of immigration enforcement.
Here are the details of what the bill would mean for the American immigration system.
Border wall
One of the signature promises of Trump’s first presidential term was his pledge to build an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall” across the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Legal challenges, logistical snags and funding shortfalls prevented him from delivering on that promise. During his first term, his administration replaced more than 400 miles worth of existing barriers, but only built 47 miles of new wall where none had existed before — at an estimated cost of $15 billion.
The new bill provides more than three times that amount for an “integrated border barrier system” that includes a plan to build 700 miles of new walls, 900 miles of barriers along the Rio Grande River, more than 600 miles of secondary barriers and an array of cutting-edge technologies to bolster the physical barriers, according to estimates from the GOP-led House Committee on Homeland Security.
Immigration detention
Since returning to the White House, Trump has mounted an unprecedented and highly controversial campaign to sweep up and deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. So far, though, the scope of his ambitions has outstretched the logistical capacity of the agencies tasked with carrying out those orders, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
ICE is on pace so far this year to more than double the number of arrests that it made in 2024, but is still trending well short of the targets his administration has set. Deportations are up, too, but only slightly above where they were during former President Joe Biden’s last year in office.
One of the biggest bottlenecks slowing ICE’s deportation progress is a lack of space to house all of the people they want to detain. Officially, ICE has enough money for 41,000 beds in detention centers across the country, but the agency reported it was detaining more than 59,000 people as of late last month.
The bill includes $45 billion to dramatically increase ICE’s detention capacity. According to estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the agency’s current $3.4 billion detention budget would more than double next year and gradually increase until it reaches nearly $15 billion by 2029.
The bill doesn’t call for ICE to build a specific number of beds, but Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has said the agency will need a minimum of 100,000 beds to carry out its mass deportation plans. Some experts believe the true total could ultimately prove to be as high as 200,000.
With this huge influx of funding, immigration detention would rival the federal prison system, both in terms of capacity and funding. There are currently more than 155,000 people being held in federal prisons nationwide, well above ICE’s stated goal but below where some estimates fall. Thanks to a modest funding boost in the bill, the Bureau of Prisons would have an average annual budget of about $9.5 billion over the next 10 years. That would be roughly equivalent to ICE’s average yearly detention funding of $9.7 billion, but dwarfed by the $14.9 billion the CBO anticipates ICE to receive in 2029.
More enforcement, more hurdles
On top of the extra funding for the wall and detention facilities, the bill would also give ICE an additional $31 billion, with the bulk of that money intended to help the agency hire new enforcement officers. Right now, the agency has 6,000 people on staff dedicated to its Enforcement and Removal Operations. The bill would give ICE the resources it needs to hire 10,000 more. Another $12 billion in the bill would go to U.S. Customs and Border Protection to hire 5,000 new customs officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.
The bill allocates $12.5 billion to support immigration enforcement efforts by state and local authorities. It would also provide $6.2 billion for border screening and surveillance technology, “including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies.”
The legislation would also impose new costs on immigrants hoping to be granted a legal right to stay in the U.S. Applying for asylum, which has historically been free, would now come with a $100 charge. The fee to apply for Temporary Protected Status would increase from $50 to $500, and the price of appealing a judge’s immigration order would jump from $110 to $900.
