President Donald Trump tours the immigration detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” on July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Florida.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” the House sent to President Donald Trump Thursday includes $175 billion to beef up his border and immigration enforcement agenda, including big investments in mass deportations.
Trump has promised to remove everyone in the country illegally.
Economists have long warned that doing so would have major consequences and according to one conservative analysis, the provisions in the megabill could add nearly $1 trillion to the national debt – pushing the price tag far higher than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimate.
The megabill includes $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hire at least 8,500 new enforcement officers, plus at least 2,000 attorneys and support staff to speed deportations.
There’s also $45 billion to boost ICE detention capacity, enough to house at least 116,000 non-citizens daily, according to an analysis from the American Immigration Council.
The funding would make the ICE budget bigger than that of any other federal law enforcement agency – 60% bigger than the Bureau of Prisons, which houses about 155,000 inmates.
CBO says the megabill overall will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt, thanks to tax cuts that outstrip spending cuts.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that ignores the loss of tax revenues from immigrants who would be deported, the impact on industries that rely on those workers, and the cost of maintaining new border security infrastructure.
“Tax revenue losses exceed the expenses for this population so significantly (that) there’s no scenario that you can cook up where they’re going to actually reduce the deficit by spending $150 billion on immigration enforcement,” he said. “It’s just fantasy.”
By Bier’s calculations, the deportation funds in the megabill will add about $900 billion to the debt.
That’s based on CBO estimates for revenue per capita from the roughly 8.7 million people who entered the U.S. illegally while Joe Biden was president.
Among other provisions, the megabill adds $20,000 bonuses for new ICE agents who stay five years.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection will receive nearly $47 billion to expand the border wall and for cameras and other detection technology.
The bill provides an extra $12 billion for CBP to hire more Border Patrol agents, purchase new vehicles and upgrade facilities.
Congressional Democrats focused much of their criticism of the bill on cuts to Medicaid and the tax cuts for billionaires relative to relief for lower-income Americans.
Republicans emphasized other aspects, including the immigration enforcement funding.
“Everything else – the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy – is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” Vice President JD Vance posted on X post on Monday, shortly before he cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to send the bill to the House.
During a visit to the “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention facility in Florida that same day, Trump asserted that the “average illegal alien costs American taxpayers an estimated $70,000.”
That echoes an estimate from Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restrictions on immigration.
“We estimate that the lifetime fiscal drain (taxes paid minus costs) for each illegal immigrant is about $68,000,” Camarota told the House Judiciary Committee last year.
An analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated that the deportation provisions in the megabill will put 6 million people out of work – including 2.6 million born in the U.S. That’s because the loss of immigrant workers would hurt many sectors of the economy.
“While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased arrests, detentions, and deportations will somehow magically create jobs for U.S. born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true; they will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone,” wrote the author, Ben Zipperer.
