President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are touting the $165 billion in spending on border security and deportation operations in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law last week. But its immigration enforcement provisions appear rife with redundancies, overlaps, and vague wording, and experts are pointing to an absence of accountability measures for how the money will be spent.
During the first Trump administration, Congress appropriated $4.47 billion for additional border barriers, with Trump redirecting billions more from the defense and treasury departments to support further construction. This year’s megabill represents a far larger investment in facilities and personnel to further the administration’s goals to reduce illegal immigration and deport people who are in the country unlawfully.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) currently has an $8 billion annual budget. Under the OBBBA, it will receive $45 billion over the next four years for migrant detention and family residential centers, and $29.8 billion for new border patrol agents and field officers. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the funding will allow it to increase its detention capacity to an average daily population of 100,000 people, almost twice the number of current immigrant detainees.
To Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has a current annual budget of around $20 billion, the bill provides $46.5 billion over the next four years for further construction of security infrastructure such as walls along the southern border, among billions in other appropriations.
“It’s turbocharging the amount of funding for immigration enforcement,” Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, told The Dispatch. “The government spends about $30 billion a year on immigration enforcement. … Then you multiply that by five.”
But in addition to the historic price tag, provisions in the bill make it unclear where large swaths of the money are going. For instance, $10 billion is appropriated to DHS to reimburse “costs incurred in undertaking activities in support of the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to safeguard the borders of the United States.” The provision does not specify a mission, time frame for the reimbursement, nor the subdivision of the DHS being reimbursed. Both ICE and CBP are part of DHS.
When The Dispatch asked DHS officials for clarification on where the $10 billion is going, they responded with their press release issued after Trump’s signing ceremony on Friday. The release makes no mention of the $10 billion in question.
The bill also provides for billions for the recruitment of new DHS personnel, but several areas appear to overlap. It sends $4.1 billion to CBP to “hire and train additional Border Patrol agents” and other “[CBP] field support personnel.” But a separate $2 billion item in another part of the bill is made available to DHS in part for the “hiring and training of additional [CBP] agents, and the necessary support staff.” And another $285 million is sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or FLETC, for the “training of newly hired Federal law enforcement personnel employed by the [DHS].” The FLETC is the center primarily responsible for training CBP agents.
“It’s a blank check,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, said of the bill. “There’s no accountability. There’s no oversight. We already know that the [DHS] rearranges money and moves around accounts whenever it feels like it. … This is a slush fund for the president to spend however he wants.”
Bigger-ticket items in the immigration enforcement section of the OBBBA also help shroud smaller ones with similarly obscure purposes. Before its revision in the Senate, the House’s version of the bill passed in May sought to dedicate $40 million—split evenly between CBP and the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement—to background checks on unaccompanied migrant minors, including examinations for “gang-related tattoos or gang-related markings.” This section of the bill, which was drafted by the House Judiciary Committee, did not specify whether the funds would be going toward compensation for DHS or HHS employees conducting the examinations, identification technology, or new facilities to house migrant youth. While DHS is responsible for housing detained adult migrants, HHS oversees unaccompanied minors.
When asked whether such examinations are already part of standard vetting procedure for undocumented minors and why an additional $40 million was necessary for such checks, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan did not offer any clarification.
“I don’t know for sure, but my understanding is we put that in there as a safeguard in light of what took place in the Biden years,” Jordan told The Dispatch, an apparent reference to reports of President Joe Biden’s administration misplacing paperwork on hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors. “I have to go back and look exactly how we did it, but my guess is it was probably in broad sense going to DHS,” he added.
In the version of the bill signed into law, examinations of undocumented minors for gang tattoos are part of a broader $300 million allocation to the Office of Refugee Resettlement that also tightens the vetting process for sponsors of undocumented minors residing in the United States. It is unclear what portion of the money will be allocated specifically to tattoo examinations.
Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, also a member of the Judiciary Committee, did not offer further clarity on how the money would be spent. “There’s a lot of things that are part of standard operating procedure that weren’t followed during the Biden administration, when he opened up our borders, refused to uphold the law, deliberately flooded our country with illegals, including gang members. And we’re trying to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Gill said.
The OBBBA also appropriates the funds necessary for new border security-oriented grant programs in states and municipalities. This includes $10 billion through 2034 for the establishment of the State Border Security Reinforcement Fund, which functions partly as a reimbursement program for state-led and local efforts during President Joe Biden’s administration to construct border fencing, slow the entry of illicit substances, and turn detained illegal migrants over to federal authorities. One such effort is Texas’ Operation Lone Star, an initiative launched at the outset of Biden’s term that Gov. Greg Abbott says has cost the state $11 billion.
“I am proud to have secured billions of dollars in the [OBBBA] to reimburse Texas taxpayers for stepping up & trying to secure the southern border during the Biden-Harris open-borders crisis,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn in an X post last week. “Texas must receive what we’re owed.”
The OBBBA’s homeland security section also features spending unrelated to border security, such as security for the 2028 Olympic Games. It also sends $300 million in reimbursements to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for “extraordinary law enforcement personnel costs” for protecting residences of the president. A FEMA spokesperson told The Dispatch that this funding is for the now-defunct Presidential Residence Protection Assistance grant program, which was active between 2017 and 2023. The program reimburses state and local law enforcement for “operational overtime costs” involved in protecting the president’s “non-governmental” residences, the spokesperson said.
The vast majority of border security appropriations in the OBBBA outlay funding until September 2029. But Bier emphasized that the federal upkeep on new infrastructure, agents, and technology would generate heavy costs over a 10-year period, long after the available funds expire.
“We’re never going to have some massive layoffs at the Department of Homeland Security. We’re never going to shut down 150,000 beds. … They’re going to come in and blow all this money rapidly—hiring people and building facilities—but then those facilities still need to be maintained, and infrastructure needs to be maintained, and employees need to be paid in the out years,” Bier said.
According to a breakdown of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the Senate’s amended bill would add $125 billion to deficits by 2034. Bier explained that this is because the OBBBA creates lasting infrastructure for what should, if successful, be a temporary series of detention and removal operations, obscuring the bill’s true cost.
“I think that’s one of the main budgetary gimmicks here that hides the true cost of what they’re doing,” Bier said. “They’re creating a permanent infrastructure, permanent positions. … There’s all this stuff that has to be funded, that will be funded—Congress isn’t going to just, like I said, purge a huge part of the department, shut down all this infrastructure, and let the wall fall down.”
