After 15 months of lawlessness and cruelty, ICE and CBP want even more money
Millions of working Americans across the country finished filing their income taxes on Tax Day this week. Their hard-earned dollars help fund programs essential to our daily lives, including public schools, fire departments, Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP. These services – healthcare and food nutrition, in particular – have become only more critical during a stark economic moment where inflation has surged to a two-year high, gas prices are only getting worse due to an entirely avoidable quagmire, and working families are being squeezed from just about every direction.
You’d think the administration would stop, take a step back, and focus on improving lives, including how to best use the tax dollars that working Americans send to federal coffers every April 15.
Nope. They’re only doubling down on their deadly mass deportation obsessions, with Donald Trump and de-facto president Stephen Miller now seeking to push tens of billions more into their mass deportation machine through another reconciliation bill. Some analysts estimate the demand could total at least $50 billion. Keep in mind this comes on top of the $191 billion in mass deportation funding they already funneled to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) last summer.
AMERICA GETS SICKER
Last year’s ugly budget law handed nearly $200 billion over to mass deportation agencies at the expense of our national community’s health, with experts finding that harms to federal Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act – including $990 billion in cuts to the former to help fund mass deportations and tax cuts for the wealthy – will ultimately leave more than 10 million people uninsured by 2034.
Meanwhile, Americans are worried sick – literally – about how to afford a doctor’s visit as mass deportation agents boast about getting bonuses for harassing American teenagers. In one Gallup poll, 61% of Americans said they worry “a great deal” about healthcare affordability, naming it their number one domestic concern. The administration has had the gall to tell Americans to sacrifice amid this economic turmoil but one-third of Americans said they’ve already been cutting back on utilities, driving less, stretching out medications, and even having to borrow money in order to pay for healthcare, Gallup said.
“These financial trade-offs are far more common among Americans who do not have health insurance, with 62% saying they have made at least one sacrifice to pay for healthcare, including 32% who have borrowed money and 24% who have prolonged medication. But even among those with insurance, close to three in 10 have made at least one sacrifice.”
AMERICA GETS HUNGRIER
Millions of children and families will sit at an empty table during meal times, after the ugly budget law cut $187 billion from the life-saving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) through 2034. It is the largest cut to food assistance in the program’s history, stripping support from 42 million Americans who rely on it for an average of $6.20 a day in grocery help.
That bears repeating: $6.20 a day – and when the mass deportation arm of the administration has been burning through money like it’s going out of style, including blowing $220 million on a vanity ad blitz and leasing a $70 million luxury jet that “features a bedroom with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs and even a bar,” NBC News reported. As the administration has declared that the luxury jet stays, everyday Americans say being able to afford to feed themselves and their families is one of their top worries.
In Michigan, for example, food banks and shelters say they’re straining to help families that are struggling due to cuts.
“We’re seeing the people who, their benefits have been cut, and they’re coming to us for services,” Chad Audi, president and CEO of the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, told the Michigan Independent. “Especially people who are depending on SNAP or people who were getting some type of grant from the state or federal funds, they now don’t receive it, they got cut out. And then they come to the shelter for service.”
AMERICA IN DANGER
The administration’s anti-immigrant obsessions are making us all less safe, after pulling 23,000 federal officers from the FBI, ATF, DEA, and U.S. Marshals off their core missions and reassigning them to round up our immigrant neighbors. This mass deportation agenda has in fact been a boon to child predators, who may now have a greater chance of being able to evade accountability for their despicable crimes after the administration diverted agents from their investigative work so they can instead help assist in immigration enforcement.
“The shift has had consequences. Homeland security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years,” The New York Times reported in November. Hany Farid, a computer scientist who helped create software that aids agents in their investigations, called the diversion of resources heartbreaking. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children,” he told The NY Times.
Our communities are less safe in other ways too. “At FEMA, senior staff typically in charge of the nation’s disaster response coordinated a recruitment program for Department of Defense employees to volunteer for southern border assignments, according to internal agency information obtained by NOTUS,” the outlet reported. “FEMA also hosted recruitment activities for DOD officials, and agency staff was paid overtime to work on the coordination effort, according to information reviewed by NOTUS.”
CRUELTY RAGES ON – PAID BY YOUR TAXES
The $45 billion in detention funding is resulting in human rights abuses like those recently documented at Arizona facilities, where federal lawmakers conducting unannounced inspections said detained immigrants awaiting deportation flights were treated worse than “animals.” Families report their detained loved ones sleeping on concrete floors in overcrowded cells reeking of feces and vomit. Federal immigration officials have boldly claimed they don’t need any warrants to forcibly enter homes in order to detain our neighbors and throw them into these facilities.
Immigration officials have also spent over $1 billion in taxpayer funds purchasing nearly a dozen warehouses to convert into mass detention camps for our immigrant neighbors. In Georgia, one proposed site would be larger than any single jail or prison building in the entire country. Meanwhile, Trump and Miller have detained more than 6,200 children since returning to power, subjecting them to inadequate medical care, poor nutrition and education, and possible lifelong trauma. When experts have said that even short amounts of detention can be harmful to children, nearly half of these kids have been held longer than the 20-day limit set by decades-old court settlements.
Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos had been held at the migrant family jail in South Texas, and continues to struggle with the trauma of his abduction and detention, his family and advocates say. “My boy is very different,” said his dad, Adrián Conejo Arias. His mom, Erika Ramos, said Liam Ramos “still lives in fear when he sees law enforcement,” People reported.
Americans have made clear they want common-sense reforms to these lawless and deadly immigration enforcement agencies. That’s why a majority of voters have said they approve of shutdown demands. And, they want their hard-earned dollars spent wisely and to the benefit of their communities.
Instead, affordable and quality healthcare will remain out of reach for far too many, children will head to school with empty bellies, and our communities will remain less safe while those in power only embolden our foes – all so mass deportation can rage on.
