The Big Bullshit Bill Is Awfully ICE-y – FIRST DRAFT
A lot of talk about the GOP’s Big Bullshit Bill is around little things like 11.8 million losing healthcare, the TRILLIONS it would add to the deficit, and the 50,000+ deaths a year it would likely cause.
You know, the little things that Republicans assure us won’t happen,
Just ask Alabama’s second-worst senator, Katie Britt. She tells Jake Tapper that if you aren’t a total loser, it’ll all be good, and by total loser, say someone disabled or someone 80 years old, I suppose. Tapper, who has been spending a lot of time pushing his book about how the Dems covering up that Biden is old is our current greatest scandal, apparently was too exhausted from book promotion to ask her a follow-up question.
TAPPER: Are you guaranteeing that these changes you are voting for will not hurt recipients in Alabama of Medicaid or food stamps for those who are citizens and truly need it and deserve it?BRITT: Absolutely. What you are talking about is able-bodied, working-aged Americans without dependents
In any event, sort of buried in all of this horribleness is a lot of money in the bill for Trump’s secret police. Not a small increase, but enough to make ICE America’s largest imprisonment organization and give it a budget that is higher than some nations’ entire defense budget.
If the GOP reconciliation bill passes, ICE gets through FY2029:- $45 billion for detention, on top of the current annual budget of $3.4 billion- $14.4 billion for transportation and removal, on top of the current annual budget of $750 million- $8 billion for hiring/retention- Billions more.
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 2025-06-28T22:07:24.068Z
While cuts in the BBB are expected to literally kill thousands of Americans every year, ICE gets one of the biggest budget boosts of any law enforcement agency in history. Already, the horror stories about ICE are many, so many that it is getting harder and harder to keep up with.
The worry I have about this is focused on the $8 billion for hiring/recruiting. Police recruiting has long had a problem in that they often use videos of violent drug raids, which real police officers like Patrick Skinner note leave new cops woefully unprepared for the reality of law enforcement. Which is that it is mundane and you are more likely to deal with a bickering couple than a drug lord. It also, as he notes, attracts people who are more interested in kicking the ass of types of people they hate than protecting and serving. In fact, during the Bush administration, the Department of Justice rang alarm bells about far-right racist crazies infiltrating the police forces across the U.S.
Given the reputation and growing disapproval among Americans of ICE and its tactics, the recruitment of new ICE officers is going to be difficult, and I imagine it will attract the kind of people who find terrorizing elderly people and children while wearing a mask to be appealing. This is also very bad, not just for people who will be targeted by ICE (note: not only immigrants), but potentially very bad for our democracy.
These terrible people will be deputized to do whatever they want, and will probably include those who are not ICE agents right now, just impersonating them to attack people they hate. And keep in mind, while they are allegedly about “illegal immigration” right now, there is no guarantee that this will be their sole mission in the near future. Remember, the SS began as Hitler’s personal security before rapidly expanding into much more.
It is not hard to imagine an expanded role for ICE under Trump, one that includes many of the same horrible functions of a secret police. I know that some of us spent the last 10 years lecturing people who are scared that they are overreacting and/or being hysterical, but if those people still feel that way, there is absolutely no reason to believe it now. If you do still think anti-Trump people are being scared sillies, then just think about how you might react if scenes similar to what we are seeing in American streets were carried out in another country. Masked people without badges grabbing folks off the streets, with no warrant, and whisking them away to facilities with horrifyingly inhumane conditions, and sometimes exporting them to a dangerous country that is not their own.
That’s what this bill is going to fund, and we will see an expansion of the abductions. And perhaps, ICE may be used for other attacks on democracy. It is not difficult at all to envision ICE being used to suppress voting by having them at polling places to intimidate not just imaginary “illegal immigrants” trying to vote, but people who disagree with them as well. This is not a democracy.
The last word goes to David Bowie and the Pat Metheny Group.
