Nearly every day, we’re seeing masked immigration enforcers sweeping through American cities armed with flash bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets. ICE agents have been caught on tape violently attacking people on their way to work, slamming people’s heads into the ground, and arresting peaceful protesters and journalists. But with the passage of Donald Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” this may be only the beginning. Trump’s budget megabill provides a jaw-dropping $175 billion for immigration enforcement, enough to create a sprawling anti-immigrant police state matching his totalitarian ambitions. The Intercept has exposed one ICE scandal after another in recent months, but with the torrent of new money flooding into Trump’s lawless mass deportation machine, we need a significant influx of funding as well to expand our reporting capacity starting right now. If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately: The budget megabill signed into law last week dedicates an extra $30 billion for ICE and $45 billion for new immigrant detention prisons. ICE will now have a budget for more agents than the FBI. The nation’s immigration detention centers will have more funding than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Already, ICE is holding a record 59,000 people in detention, a 50 percent increase from the end of the Biden administration, and the majority of those detained since Trump took office had no criminal convictions of any type. With more cash in hand, ICE can be expected to double down on tactics like workplace raids and blatant racial profiling. Meanwhile, immigration courts are already facing a crippling backlog, and Trump's budget megabill caps the number of immigration judges at 800, far fewer than what will be needed to handle the enormous surge in caseload. Their plan is clear: Arrest, detain, and deport as many people as possible with no due process whatsoever, no matter how many U.S. citizens, legal residents, and other innocent bystanders are swept up in the process. This kind of lawless secret police force is utterly incompatible with democracy — and there’s no more urgent story to cover right now. 
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The Intercept team
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