President Donald Trump and other Republicans like to say the United States does not have money for programs that address the needs of ordinary citizens.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said recently, saying that the nation had more important things to do, like “fighting wars.”
But in fact, the nation has plenty of money for such programs. It’s just that Trump wants to spend it on other things, like funding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.
In a largely party-line vote this June, Congress granted the Trump Administration another $70 billion for ICE and others to conduct mass deportations and detention. This colossal increase came less than a year after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated an unprecedented $170 billion through 2029 for his cruel immigration crackdown.
American families are grappling with a cost of living crisis; many are struggling to cover rent, groceries, electric bills, and health care. Yet rather than helping working people make ends meet, Republicans have, in these two bills, authorized a staggering $240 billion for the systematic separation of families and disruption of communities.
This new total equates to eight years of funding for ICE and Border Patrol. It is a sum greater than the gross domestic product of 161 nations.
Meanwhile, public approval for immigration enforcement agencies has plummeted as Americans have watched ICE agents invade cities, separate families, and brutalize citizens and non-citizens alike. We’ve seen people locked up in inhumane detention centers, where record numbers of people have died in custody. Others have been deported to countries they’ve never before set foot in, often without due process.
Worse still, the money funding these abuses comes directly out of programs that actually help families. The $240 billion windfall didn’t come from just anywhere. It’s paid for by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s severe cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—two essential and popular programs that provide health care and food aid to millions of working families.
This law is expected to strip away health insurance from an estimated sixteen million people by 2034. Some of the worst effects are already being felt—at least four million people have lost access to SNAP assistance since the bill was enacted in July 2025. Millions more are likely to lose benefits in the near future as the program shifts more costs to the states, another first under the law.
Instead of funding the mass deportation machine, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, where I work, has found better ways to put that $240 billion to use.
With the amount we’re now spending on rogue immigration agencies, we could instead fully restore this year’s cuts to SNAP ($18.6 billion) and Medicaid ($91 billion) from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; provide medical care for more than one million veterans through 2029 ($71.6 billion); establish universal preschool for kids across the United States ($35 billion); and make school lunches free for all thirty million children served through the National School Lunch Program ($6.38 billion).
We could do all that as well as power more than ten million households with solar energy through 2029 ($17 billion), investing in long-term renewable energy while American families grapple with rising fossil fuel costs.
Our government needs to put families first. We can’t let ICE and Border Patrol continue to harm our communities while the rest of us struggle to pay our bills and afford groceries.
Yet, astonishingly, House Republicans are asking for another $30 billion for immigration enforcement in fiscal year 2027. They seem determined to keep moving in the wrong direction.
Congress should claw back the $240 billion it has allocated for mass deportations and detention and not give a dollar more.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.