Whenever I have a question about how federal immigration funding works, I go to Heidi Altman, Vice President of Policy at the National Immigration Law Center. She has been a voice of principle and clarity, and I have benefited enormously from her work over the past several years. That’s why, when President Trump signed the new $70 billion immigration enforcement slush fund into law last week, I reached out to Heidi to ask if she would help us understand what’s going on. She generously agreed.
Like so many of the people I talk to, she came to policy research and advocacy first from a place of serving clients caught up in the criminal legal and immigration systems and doing deportation defense lawyering. She reminded me that nothing disabuses you of the idea that we have functioning legal systems quite like sitting with the people trying to survive them.
I asked Heidi to start our conversation about the latest funding bill from the basics, because in immigration enforcement the budget is where the story begins. Her basic but crucial point is that the simple availability of money itself—not actual urgency—drives so much of what actually happens to people on the ground.
“What we’ve seen over years now is that the amount of money that ICE has actually drives their policy. So, when Congress gives them X amount of dollars to jail X amount of people, they will always hit that maximum. When the dollars go down, they will detain fewer people.”
As Heidi explained, normally that money moves through annual appropriations, which need 60 votes in the Senate and therefore force a bipartisan compromise. Those compromises are where the guardrails come from, which include the data-reporting requirements and detention rules that get attached to the dollars. But this is not how Congress passed this funding bill. On June 10, President Trump signed S.2, roughly $70 billion that Republicans pushed through budget reconciliation on a party-line vote, a process never meant for routine annual funding, on top of the $170 billion they moved the same way last summer.
By NILC’s own count, the new law sends $38 billion to ICE and $26 billion to CBP and locks the spending in through 2029, leaving the two agencies with about eight times their historical annual budget. It also strips the transparency rules, including the requirement that ICE publish basic data on who it is detaining, which is the foundation of the work I have written about for years and the reason we built Detention Reports. All of this comes in a year when ICE has already recorded its 19th death in custody and detainees at facilities like Delaney Hall are on hunger strike over the conditions they face.
So much of this money continues to flow toward civil immigrant detention. Alongside the usual contracts with county jails and private operators like GEO and CoreCivic, ICE is now buying old warehouses outright to convert into detention centers at an absurd markup at the taxpayer’s expense—and all this at a time when Americans are facing a dire affordability crisis. Researchers at Project Saltbox found the government paid above the most recent market valuation at every site, including a Texas warehouse ICE bought for $123 million that had last been valued at $11 million.
Money is also flowing into military-grade equipment. Senator Schiff’s office found that ICE and CBP spending on weapons, ammunition, and accessories like chemical weapons rose fourfold in a single year, which Heidi reads as a sign that this administration treats the agencies as a personal paramilitary force rather than a civil one.
I asked Heidi where she stands on immigrant detention today—whether there should ever be detention at all—and while she acknowledges the political pressures, her conclusion is one that many of us have drawn after years of examining this system. Simply put, the civil nature of the US immigration system is at the center of Heidi’s larger argument that there is no good reason for an immigration detention system at all. She did not start her career believing this, but years inside these facilities changed her mind.
“[Immigrant detention] should not be thought of as a public safety issue. Anyone who is in immigration detention is there because ICE is alleging that they have, in some way, violated the civil federal immigration law.”
No one in immigration detention is serving a criminal sentence. They are there because ICE alleges a civil violation, whether an overstayed visa or a years-old conviction someone already served their time for and came home from. It’s an expensive and deadly system, and one that we may not even need in the first place.
For anyone who wants to explore this argument more closely, my Ohio State colleague César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández makes it at length in his very readable book Migrating to Prison, which traces how the immigration prison system grew and why locking people up for civil violations is both unjust and a poor use of public money.
When I asked Heidi about the various legislative solutions that have emerged in Congress in recent years, she emphasized maintaining a bright line on the principle of citizenship and not buying into carceral logics:
“We cannot support a bill that creates essentially a second class of people in the United States who will never be a full part of, or be able to be a full part of our citizenry.”
Citizenship, she argues, is the center of where Congress needs to move, because anything less builds a permanent second class of people who work and pay taxes but never fully belong, never reunite with family abroad, and travel in fear of being shut out. After $240 billion committed to enforcement, she says it is time to retire the old bargain that any protection for immigrant communities has to be bought with more enforcement and surveillance.
Running underneath a lot of our conversation was the topic of language and framing. The administration sells its enforcement as targeting the worst of the worst, and the data does not bear that out. The deeper danger, Heidi argues, is repeating the criminalizing frame at all.
“Those people [do not] deserve to be put back into a carceral setting, separated from their loved ones, and subjected to what now are truly life-threatening conditions. So I challenge us to not talk within that frame that the Trump administration has used that is so dehumanizing and criminalizing.”
She made the point with a tax analogy. Imagine you were not sure whether you had cheated on your taxes, and one morning men in camouflage with machine guns arrived at your door to take you to a prison. That might feel outlandish to us, but her question is why it stops feeling bizarre when the civil violation is in the immigration code instead of the tax code.
Heidi provided a vision for what comes next, at least on the funding side. Congress wrote these checks through reconciliation, and Congress can repeal the bills and claw back whatever has not yet been spent.
“Congress can give money, but then Congress can take money back. So there is nothing stopping the House and the Senate from passing a bill that takes back the funds from these two reconciliation bills that have not been obligated.”
Beyond the clawback, she talked about repair and reconstruction, dismantling an enforcement-first system and rebuilding one organized around welcome, rights, and the dignity of every person who arrives, however long that takes. In the meantime, she left everyone with the simplest possible action, which is to call Congress every day with one message.
“Do not give one more dollar to ICE or Border Patrol, and take back the money that’s already been given. You can call, just say that every day.”
What a powerful note to end on! My profound thanks to Heidi for her time and her clarity, and to everyone who joined us live.