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 $4.1 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 ICE funding through 2029.
What does that even look like? The figure would fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history; it will 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 even 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 NYC buses free
1451 times private prison company CoreCivic’s net 2024 income
568 times the cost to pay all US students’ public school lunch debt
1923 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 Bezos-Sánchez weddings
388 of the HIV-vaccine program that 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 alone
185 years of operating Guantánamo Bay
2.1 times what it would cost to hire enough teachers and nurses to end both national shortages
7.6 Rupert Murdochs
385 Rick Scotts, the richest US senator
170 times the amount Trump’s bill cuts from the National Parks
2.63 times what USAID spent in 2023
12 times the 2023 Federal Bureau of Prisons budget
2 times Harvard’s endowment, the largest of any university in the world
7 times the 2021 federal childcare funding
4.4 times what the US has spent on Israel’s military since the October 7 attacks
