https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/publications/trumps-bad-plan-make-america-argentina-again
Saturday, October 4, 2025
Friday, October 3, 2025
“Deportation Industrial Complex”
Big Budget Act Creates a “Deportation-Industrial Complex” le
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The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine that will be hard to dismantle.
August 13, 2025
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/AP
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The so-called One Big Beautiful Act allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States. The bill adds billions of dollars to border enforcement, but the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.
Although the population of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has remained fairly constant over the past 10 years, overall immigration has increased since the 1970s, and increased funding has been needed to fairly and efficiently address that growth. But the scale and focus of the increases are startling. The July 2025 funding package appropriates huge sums for deportations while neglecting processes that are needed for a fair and workable immigration system, such as immigration judges to ensure citizens or immigrants are not erroneously deported. The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine. Most detention facilities will be operated by for-profit private prison corporations and other private contractors, creating strong economic and political interests that will make the new apparatus very difficult to dismantle.
Taken together long-term detention and surveillance contracts, rapid hiring increases for enforcement, and new monetary incentives for reprioritizing law enforcement on immigration will create a deportation-industrial complex—an enforcement machine with financial and political constituencies that will outlast this administration.
Scale and Recipients of the July 2025 Funding
The biggest piece of the pie for enforcement operations in the United States will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. Congress gave ICE $75 billion over four years, approximately $18.7 billion each year. Added to the $10 billion Congress already appropriated ICE for fiscal year 2025 in March, ICE now has $28.7 billion at its disposal this year. That $28.7 billion figure is nearly triple ICE’s entire budget for FY24.
Two-thirds of ICE’s funding – $45 billion over four years – will be used to detain immigrants, potentially more than 100,000 people per year. The $11.25 billion added to ICE’s annual detention budget is a 400% increase from last year and exceeds the Department of Justice budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 for the entire federal prison system, which holds 155,000 people.
The law explicitly allows ICE to build more facilities to jail families, often mothers with their children, and does not align with a decades-old settlement that addresses the treatment of immigrant children.
The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers. That amount is a 300% increase over ICE’s entire $10 billion prior-year budget.
The bill also allocates billions of dollars to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which already received a $20 billion dollar appropriation for fiscal year 2025. The July funding bill gives CBP almost $65 billion more over 4 years, nearly $47 billion of which is earmarked for continued construction of a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border . This is a stark increase from the amount allocated to the border wall during the first Trump administration, when Congress appropriated $5 billion and President Trump ordered the Department of Defense to divert an additional $10 billion.
The remaining $18.2 billion for CBP in the July funding bill will go to hiring, facilities, technology, and surveillance. Surveillance of border communities already raises significant privacy concerns that CBP has failed to address. A funding surge will enable CBP to supercharge those efforts, further invading the privacy of citizens and noncitizens alike and eroding trust in the government.
Additional funds to support immigration enforcement go to state and local jurisdictions with more than $10 billion for border-related law enforcement support. Congress also gave the Department of Defense $1 billion and established an unrestricted $10 billion fund that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security can allocate for any border enforcement purposes.
The administration has already significantly increased pressure on local jurisdictions to enter agreements with ICE to assist with immigration enforcement. Funneling huge sums to state and local jurisdictions will likely divert them from their core law enforcement priorities. The $10 billion unrestricted fund – an amount equal to ICE’s entire budget last year – gives DHS a huge immigration enforcement carrot to dangle in front of DHS components, private contractors, and local and state law enforcement agencies, enticing them to seek those funds to carry out DHS priorities with minimal accountability.
How does this compare to other law-enforcement spending?
The $170 billion price tag for immigration enforcement eclipses other law enforcement expenditures at the federal, state, and local level. It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.
Even the slice that goes just to ICE this year – nearly $29 billion – exceeds the budgets for all other non-immigration federal law enforcement functions put together, eclipsing funding to agencies whose law enforcement missions involve pursuing terrorists, violent criminals, sex offenders, fentanyl and other drug traffickers, and gun traffickers.
Does the entire immigration system receive funding?
No. The law substantially increases funds for deportations without providing any money to make the system more fair or functional. While the administration is planning to deport a million immigrants each year, the law does not significantly increase access to the immigration courts — which already have a backlog of nearly 4 million cases — to assess whether they are citizens or otherwise entitled to stay in the United States.
In fact, the funding bill caps hiring of new immigration judges over the next three and a half years at 800 new judges. That’s a 14% increase compared to a 400% increase in funding for immigration detention centers. The disparity signals a plan to dispense with due process in deportations or to let immigrants languish in detention centers while waiting for a hearing. The current corps of immigration judges is already stretched desperately thin, particularly in the wake of the administration’s termination of 65 immigration judges, all of whom are career employees.
The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine.
Legal help in immigration court fades as Trump administration ramps up arrests
The administration has also moved to halt all legal orientation and support programs that help vulnerable immigrants navigate the complex immigration system, including programs that help children and families separated during the first administration. In addition, there is no money in the bill to support the processing of lawful immigration or citizenship applications by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which already has a record 11.3 million pending cases.
Who is ICE targeting for arrest and detention?
Although the administration repeatedly said it is deporting the “worst of the worst,” its enforcement efforts are sweeping in many people with no criminal records to meet the White House goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day. ICE also changed its policy to allow arrests in places that had been considered off-limits, so now agents are arresting mothers in front of their children as they take them to school, immigrants as they go to church, and asylum seekers when they seek protection in immigration courts.
The administration has also abruptly changed the rules. Immigrants who applied for and were granted legal or protected status have seen that status terminated and are now targets of the administration’s enforcement actions as well. They include immigrants who were lawfully paroled into the country, along with people with temporary protected status from countries experiencing ongoing civil unrest or environmental disasters. The same is true for individuals whose deportation had been deferred for humanitarian reasons such as children who are awaiting visas because they were abandoned or abused. The government is moving swiftly to arrest, detain, and deport them. The surge of new funding will increase the number of people it can target.
What do these allocations signal about the administration’s priorities?
The administration argues that ramped-up immigration enforcement is needed to improve public safety and national security and that it is prioritizing immigration enforcement over all other law enforcement efforts, even though research indicates that immigrants do not drive up crime rates. Nevertheless, the administration has pulled FBI, drug, and gun agents away from their core missions to help pursue immigrants. It also has cut crime prevention programs that supported efforts to reduce violence and criminal justice research across 48 states and territories. For fiscal year 2026, the administration is proposing further funding cuts, including eliminating 1,500 FBI employees, defunding other law enforcement agencies, and cutting vital programs designed to keep Americans safe. In short, all other federal public safety efforts now take a back seat to arresting and detaining immigrants – the vast majority of whom do not have a criminal record. Similarly, the administration’s funding allocation makes clear that deportation is the top priority, even if other core values – like due process to ensure the law is accurately applied – may be compromised.
What are the risks of the rapid, massive funding surge?
ICE will likely rush to spend its full allocation of funds, but it takes more than money to build detention facilities, hire additional staff, and buy equipment. It also requires staff to do the hiring and to ensure compliance with rules governing hiring and procurement. The rush to spend money fast is likely to result in large amounts of funding flowing to private contractors, with pressure to cut corners.
Private prison firms will reap most of the financial benefits of the detention budget, as nearly 90 percent of people in ICE custody are already held in for-profit prisons. Months before the president signed the budget bill in July, ICE already had solicited contracts from private firms, setting up an expedited contract process. The two largest for-profit companies have been significant financial supporters of the president and one has hired several former high-level ICE officials. Oversight of these private facilities is significantly diminished because the administration has gutted the oversight offices at DHS and is defying some efforts at Congressional oversight.
The rush to spend a 300% budget increase will also strain ICE’s ability to hire quality staff (roughly 10,000 deportation officers). According to a 2017 Inspector General report, to hire 10,000 officers, ICE would need 500,000 applicants, but the push to hire comes at a time when law enforcement agencies nationwide have had difficulty filling their ranks and unemployment rates are low. ICE already has special hiring authority that allows it to bypass the usual rigorous hiring procedures for federal employees, and deportation officers are not required to meet the same requirements as other federal law enforcement officers, such as having prior law enforcement experience. Pressure to hire quickly risks further lowering the bar or taking additional short cuts that are more likely to lead to hiring people whose work or criminal history should be disqualifying. Past efforts to accelerate the hiring of 5,000 CBP officers – half of the goal for new ICE hires – resulted in corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling organizations, that far exceeded rates of corruption at other law enforcement agencies.
What should happen instead?
An enforcement-heavy posture — with detention largely outsourced to for-profit companies— will build a durable deportation infrastructure that is hard to reverse once funding, contracts, and staffing are locked in. Once an agency receives funding and begins hiring and entering contracts for firms to build facilities and ramp up the nation’s immigrant detention apparatus, expectations for continued funding become entrenched, making it difficult to reverse the trend.
Instead of a deportation-only approach, funding should be balanced to screen for humanitarian claims like asylum; process more legal immigration applications; and hire enough judges to hold immigration court hearings. We are a nation of laws — including immigration laws — and a core American principle embedded in our Constitution is that everyone is entitled to due process to make sure that the law is being applied faithfully and accurately. Funding choices should reflect that principle.
This article first appeared at Just Security.
Thursday, October 2, 2025
The Messiness of Life
Krishnamurti
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IMAGINE THAT ONE SECOND STRETCHED OUT TO BE A LIFETIME!
Eckhart Tolle - Presence
Sunday, September 28, 2025
"And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” - General Milley Warns Trump Today
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WATCH: Gen. Milley delivers defense of democracy in farewell address | PBS News
JOINT BASE MYER-HENDERSON HALL, Va. (AP) — Army Gen. Mark Milley delivered a full-throated defense of democracy and not-so-subtle swipes at former President Donald Trump during a packed ceremony on Friday as he closed out his four, often tumultuous years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Watch the ceremony in the player above.
Under cloudy skies at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Milley never mentioned the former president by name. But he practically shouted on two different occasions that the U.S. military swears to protect the Constitution “against ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic.”
“We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” he said. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Milley is retiring after more than four decades of military service, including multiple combat deployments and two often turbulent years as Joint Chiefs chairman under Trump. And it was those years, and the battles he fought against Trump, that formed much of the underpinning of his farewell address, and were sprinkled throughout other speeches in the ceremony.
As chairman, Milley pushed back against a host of Trump’s plans, including demands to pull all troops out of Iraq and Syria and his desire to put active-duty troops on Washington’s streets to counter racial protests. Several books have described Milley’s deep concerns about Trump’s fitness as commander in chief and his worries that Trump would try to use the military to help block President Joe Biden’s election.
WATCH: Biden offers dire warnings about Trump in democracy-focused address
Just a week ago, Trump railed against Milley in a post on Truth Social, condemning him as a treasonous, “Woke train wreck” whose actions have been “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” The post, which some interpreted as a threat, has prompted Milley to ensure his family has adequate protection.
Biden, who spoke at the ceremony, continued the democracy theme, praising Milley’s staunch defense of the Constitution, which “has always been Mark’s North Star.” And he said the general has been a steady hand guiding the military during one of the most complex national security environments.
The farewell tribute on the base just outside Washington was both rousing and somber, with marching bands, troop salutes and speeches. Milley’s four-year term as chairman ends at midnight Saturday, and Air Force Gen. CQ Brown takes over Sunday. Milley is retiring. after nearly 44 years of service.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recalled Milley as a battle buddy, noting with a grin that he was always “eager to get into the fight. And I’ve seen that firsthand over our long history of working together, including one time when he got me blown up. Literally.”
When Austin was commanding the 10th Mountain Division during the Iraq War he visited Milley, one of his brigade commanders, who suggested they go to the hospital to see a wounded service member.
“So we took Route Irish in Baghdad, which was known as the most dangerous road in the world. And we promptly got hit by an IED,” Austin told the crowd. “Afterwards, I asked, ‘Hey general, has this happened to you before?’ And Mark said, ‘Oh yes sir — I’ve been blown up about five times now.’”
Saturday, September 27, 2025
U.S. Is Added to Human Rights Watchlist
U.S. Is Added to Human Rights Watchlist
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The United States was added Sunday to the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, a research tool that publicizes the status of freedoms and threats to civil liberties worldwide.
The move comes amid President Donald Trump’s “assault on democratic norms and global cooperation,” said CIVICUS—a global alliance and network of civil society groups, including Amnesty International, that advocates for greater citizen action in areas where civil liberties are limited—in a press release. The organization also cited the Administration’s cut of more than 90% of its foreign aid contracts and its crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—which Trump called “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”—through executive action.
“The Trump Administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society,” said Mandeep Tiwana, Interim Co-Secretary General of CIVICUS, in a press release. “Restrictive Executive Orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the Administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal.”
Other countries on the watchlist include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan, and Serbia.
CIVICUS outlines the state of civil rights through five categories—open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed. “Open” is the highest ranking, meaning all people are able to practice liberties such as free speech, and the lowest is “closed.” Per CIVICUS, instances that result in a “decline in open civic space” include “repressive legislation that curtails free speech and dialogue, obstacles to civil society activities and operations and crackdowns on civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations
The U.S. has been classified as “narrowed.” The “narrowed” label is CIVICUS’ assessment that while most people are able to exercise their rights of expression, free speech, and assembly, there are some attempts to violate these rights by the government. For example, CIVICUS cited crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protestors during the Biden Administration, after advocates took to the streets and staged college encampments to voice their discontent with the military assistance and funding the U.S. was sending to Israel. Students participated in demonstrations to demand their schools divest from any companies that profit from or have a relationship with Israel.
“We urge the United States to uphold the rule of law and respect constitutional and international human rights norms,” said Tiwana. “Americans across the political spectrum are appalled by the undemocratic actions of the current Administration.”
The White House has rejected CIVICUS’ assessment. “This is nonsense: President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history,” said Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly in an email statement on Tuesday.
The "narrowed" category also reflects CIVICUS’ assessment that while there is an existing free press, there may be restrictions due to regulation or political pressure on media owners.
This comes at a time when the editorial decisions made by major media organizations and governing bodies have prompted much discussion.
In February, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation into NPR and PBS due to concerns that they were “violating federal law by airing commercials,” which both newsroom CEOs deny. The FCC chair also spoke out against public funding for the two news sites.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and owner of the Washington Post, directed the organization to change the scope of its opinion pages in February, informing the team that they will be writing “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos said in his note to the Post team.
That same month, the White House announced its press team will pick the reporters who participate in the press pool—a move the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said is about “restoring power back to the American people, who President Trump was elected to serve.” However, many journalism advocates criticized the act. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the White House Correspondents’ Association said in a statement on Feb. 25.
The White House is also currently ensnared in a lawsuit brought forward by the Associated Press. The news organization has sued three Trump Administration officials—including Leavitt—after it was barred from access to the White House press briefings because it refused to change its editorial style and refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” after Trump renamed it in an Executive Orderhe signed in January.
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
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