What $100 Billion in New ICE Funding Would Look Like

Inae Oh

09 Jul 2025

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Andres Kudacki/Getty

The staggering increase in ICE enforcement is difficult to process. These numbers will help.

Originally published in Mother Jones.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic agenda, which seeks to inject plutocratic ideology and disdain for the poor into nearly every corner of American life, is on the verge of passage. Its success comes despite overwhelming unpopularity and official estimates that it will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt while slashing $930 billion from Medicaid over a decade.

Yet even for all the descriptors that have been attached to Trump’s budget bill—big, mega, supercharged—the scope of one of its most crushing ambitions appears to have been lost on the American public: more than $100 billion in new funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029.

What does that even look like? The figure would fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history. It would ramp up mass deportations to an unprecedented scale; create hastily built, sordid detention centers across the country; and all but ensure that millions of people who haven’t been accused of crimes are disappeared.

Here are some ways to process the scale of $100 billion in ICE funding:

343 times what Elon Musk spent to swing the 2024 elections

140 times the cost to make New York City buses free

1,451 times private prison company CoreCivic’s net 2024 income

568 times the cost to pay all US students’ public school lunch debt

1,923 times the amount saved by the bill’s defunding of Planned Parenthood

62.5 times what the US paid in reparations to over 82,000 interned Japanese Americans

2,000 Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez weddings

388 of the HIV vaccine program the Trump administration eliminated, effectively ending chances for a shot to prevent infections

8 times what the US spent to develop and purchase Covid vaccines in 2020

185 years of operating the Guantánamo Bay prison

2.1 times what it would cost to hire enough teachers and nurses to end both national shortages