There’s an Alarming Part of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” You Probably Haven’t Heard Much About

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Ever since Republicans’ budget megabill passed the GOP-controlled House—by just one vote, mind you—the headlines about it have largely focused on its cuts to Medicaid. But one noteworthy aspect of the bill has gotten much less attention: It would massively increase the amount of taxpayer dollars going to immigration enforcement.

Though Republicans are touting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a historic tax-saving, economy-boosting piece of legislation, it sets aside a whopping $80 billion for immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council. All in all, the AIC concluded that if signed into law, the OBBBA “would represent the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States.”

Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it has “an annual budget of approximately $8 billion,” and $3.4 billion of that is spent on detention, according to the AIC. Under the OBBBA, the agency would be given $45 billion for immigration detention alone through September 2029, which amounts to about $12 billion annually. The bill also gives ICE $14 billion to spend on deportation operations and $8 billion to hire more ICE officers.

Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the AIC, has been closely tracking the OBBBA as it was finalized and passed the House. “If you compare the detention budget to fiscal year 2023, which is the last fiscal year we have a clear-cut number for, this is a 265 percent increase,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection, and ICE, has already been on the front lines of much of the Trump administration’s lawless activity that’s being challenged in the courts: grabbing a student off the street for writing an op-ed; arresting people as they leave court hearings, and brazenly deporting people to countries they are not from, ignoring at least two different judges’ orders.

“The kinds of dollars we’re talking about would really unlock an ability for the Trump administration to level up the cruelty of their enforcement actions at taxpayer expense,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, “in a way that I’m not sure we can even envision right now.”

And there’s another historic change buried in the bill: It would charge asylum-seekers exorbitant fees just to submit an application to be considered to live here. Currently, when a person looks to leave their home country because of fear that they’ll be persecuted over their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, they can immigrate to the U.S. and, once they are on American soil, apply for asylum. The process is free, as U.S. lawmakers up until this point have respected the fact that these folks are oftentimes fleeing life-threatening situations. The OBBBA would change that by charging individuals $1,000 a pop to submit an asylum application.

Orozco noted that there have been attempts in the past to instate a fee for asylum applications, including during Trump’s first term, but it was only around $50 and never ended up materializing. If the OBBBA becomes law—and if this provision isn’t stripped out as the bill makes its way through the Senate—it would be the first time in our country’s history that applying for asylum would carry a fee.

On top of the $1,000 base fee, the bill would require asylum-seekers to cough up $100 every year that their application is pending. According to USCIS, asylum applications are resolved “within 180 days” after they are filed, but TRAC, a government watchdog group, estimates that DHS has a backlog of 3.6 million active immigration cases, including asylum applications. The average wait time for all immigration cases to resolve is 636 days—and TRAC notes not just that asylum cases tend to take judges more time but that the backlog of those cases has been growing. Based on that estimate, it would take roughly two years for an asylum case to be resolved.

The bill includes a host of other immigration-related fees, including a mandatory $550 every six months in order to keep a work permit. It also increases the current fee for appealing an asylum-application decision from $110 to $900. The OBBBA does not include any pathway to waive these charges.

“People who are applying for asylum the first time are not yet work-authorization eligible, so you’re asking people who don’t have legal permission to work in this country to somehow pull together the funds for an application,” Altman said. “And it’s also misaligned with international law and our obligations under the Refugee Convention to require people to pay, particularly that steep of a fee, for just getting access to asylum protections.”

The OBBBA is currently in the Senate, where it could undergo significant changes—particularly because of the Byrd rule, which requires that everything in a reconciliation bill be directly related to the budget.

To Orozco’s knowledge, Democrats have been mostly silent when it comes to the OBBBA’s immigration policies. “At the end of the day, we do recognize that it’s an uphill battle, that a lot of the conversation around the reconciliation bill is not about immigration,” he said. “We will be trying to make those arguments and are hoping that we are able to at least decrease or remove some of these fees, but we are concerned that there’s a real possibility that these can be imposed.”

Donald Trump has made it clear he wants this bill on his desk to sign into law by July 4, but Senate Republicans have a long road ahead of them. They can afford to lose only three votes, and so far, at least three lawmakers have indicated they would vote against the current version of the bill.