After Shutdown Loss, Trump Doubles Down on Immigration in His New Budget

President Trump is seeking $8.6 billion in his fiscal year 2020 budget proposal to build the wall along the U.S./Mexico border. Aaron Reichlin-Melnickp in Immigration Impact looks at the proposal and its immigration impacts.

Recall that Congress narrowly averted a second government shutdown last month by reaching a bipartisan agreement on the Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 budget, which gave President Trump very little of his border demands. The President is undeterred and last week made a budget request for the next fiscal year. It calls for a whopping $8.6 billion in border wall funding, far more than what Congress agreed to in February.

But funding for the wall is not the end of the immigration enforcement funding request.  The Trump administration also is requesting funds for an even greater expansion of immigration detention than ever before. Although the FY 2019 budget requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to lower the amount of people they detain to 40,520 by September 2019, the new budget would allow ICE to detain up to 54,000 people—the highest level in the history of the agency.

Moreover, thw Trump administration’s budgert proposal seeks funding to create a border security “slush fund” that would permit ICE to expand detention even further. The fund, which the administration calls “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Fund,” would be bankrolled by fees paid by immigrants pay to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for legal immigration benefits. such as visas or citizenship applications.

This new fund would allow ICE to expand detention capacity beyond the 54,000 beds requested from Congress, up to 60,000 beds. The money would also to be used to increase family detention beds to 10,000. This would triple the administration’s current capacity.

In addition, the budget request calls for a significant increase in personnel, calling for $192 million to hire 750 Border Patrol agents and 171 new Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at ports of entry.

Tthe budget plans to add a “10 percent surcharge to immigration filing fees” for “deficit reduction.” Although such fees are normally used to fund USCIS operations, the new “surcharge” would apparently not be used for that purpose and would instead be treated as general government revenue.

KJ