ICE Budget Balloons

From Indivisible National Newsletter:

This is the part of the BBB that will become immediately visible. The drastic Medicaid and Food Stamp cuts largely don’t take effect until after the midterms, and the tax cuts for billionaires and corporations will be largely invisible to the public. But the American Gestapo is funded now -- right now. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) annual budget balloons to $37.5 billion.

This makes ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the republic. To put this in perspective, here are the sizes of other federal law enforcement agencies, many of which have entire TV dramas devoted to them:

Why do they need all this funding?

Simple. They want to take the terror and militarization that they brought to Los Angeles and do the same thing in communities around the country. They’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but they haven’t had the money. Now, they’ve got the money.

When does this money flow? Now.

This means a hiring spree of 10,000 goons for Kristi Noem and Tom Homan, 100,000 new detention beds, and mega- detention camps around the country. My home state of Texas is already preparing for one mega-camp site.

I don’t know why the broader political and media ecosystems aren’t yet focused on this. There is almost an instinctual pivot to bland political analysis: “How is this going to affect the midterms?” But we can’t wait 16 months for the midterms to start pushing back against this federal overreach. We cannot afford to wait. We have to organize against this in our own communities.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash