Editor’s note: This blog was originally published by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) on April 2, 2025, and is cross-posted with permission. The authors of the post are Heidi Altman and Jennifer Whitlock. NILC is a member of the Coalition on Human Needs.

Congress is marching ahead with efforts to enact a massive funding bill through a process called “Budget Reconciliation.” Unlike normal lawmaking, this process requires only a simple majority of votes to pass both the House and Senate. The White House and allied lawmakers intend to use the bill to extend tax cuts for billionaires, slash funding for crucial anti-poverty and safety net programs and supercharge immigration enforcement tactics.

This explainer describes how a reconciliation bill will unlock the Trump administration’s ability to experiment with new and heightened authoritarian tactics through immigration enforcement, threatening basic constitutional rights and democratic norms.

In its first few months in office, the Trump administration has: invoked war powers to send Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison notorious for torture without notice or a hearing, targeted green card and visa holding university students for deportation because of their political advocacy, and carried out raids in sensitive community settings such as schools and homeless shelters. The reconciliation bill’s passage would dramatically enhance the administration’s ability to continue and expand these practices.

Budget instructions currently in play require the reconciliation bill to provide up to between $90 and $175 billion in spending increases over a 10-year period through the two congressional committees with jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). Among other areas, their combined jurisdiction includes:

• immigration enforcement and border policy, largely carried out by DHS;
• immigration courts, funded through the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) within DOJ; and
• enforcement of migration-related criminal offenses, as prosecuted by the Office of Immigration Litigation (OIL) within DOJ.

Providing the Trump administration a blank check for their immigration enforcement agenda would mean some or all of the following:

1. Expanded Use of Wartime Authorities and U.S. Community Members Disappeared to Foreign Jails

• In March 2025, the Trump administration invoked a wartime authority known as the Alien Enemies Act to unlawfully send more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador without notice or due process. The United States reportedly paid the government of El Salvador $6 million to jail the group upon their arrival in an infamous prison from which human rights monitors believe no one has ever escaped. Many families first learned where their loved ones were from news reports documenting brutal treatment. Emerging stories reveal the shockingly flimsy justifications used by the government to justify these deportations, such as the young soccer coach whose family believes he was targeted because of a tattoo he got to remind him of his favorite soccer team.
• This abuse of wartime authority to disappear individuals from the U.S. should be a wake-up call for all as to what comes next. According to recent reporting, the Trump administration believes the Alien Enemies Act also gives it the authority to make warrantless arrests, an action that could be used to target citizens and noncitizens alike simply on the basis of a tattoo the government claims suggests gang affiliation. Additionally, in its day 1 executive orders the administration forecasted its desire to use the Insurrection Act, another wartime authority, to unleash the military against immigrant communities. Increased funding for more arrests, flights, personnel, and payments to countries like El Salvador will be used to violate human rights on a mass scale.

2. Mega Immigration Jail at Guantanamo Bay

• The Trump administration has directed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to create a mega jail with capacity to detain 30,000 immigrants facing civil immigration proceedings on Guantanamo Bay. For context, the current largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in the United States has a capacity of around 2,000 people. The administration has already sent hundreds of people from immigration detention in the United States to the infamous prison. There, U.S. officials are subjecting them to horrific conditions including regular invasive strip searches, prolonged stays in solitary, and little to no access to counsel or phone calls with loved ones.
• A massive infusion of funding would allow the government to actually create its dreamed-of mega immigration jail on Guantanamo Bay, setting the stage for a human rights catastrophe.

3. Detention At Military Bases and Co-Opting of U.S. Armed Forces

• The administration is also planning to use funds to detain immigrants in large numbers at military sites or with the cooperation of the military. Using military sites and military personnel for the detention of migrants on U.S. soil is deeply concerning because these actions turn the military into a domestic police force. Like the use of Guantanamo Bay, such operations drain military resources and raise readiness concerns.
• Using military bases to detain immigrants raises numerous due process concerns; it is almost certain that immigrants detained would be unable to meaningfully access counsel or the evidence they need to defend against their deportation cases. Generally, military bases are off limits to civilians, likely including attorneys, medical professionals, and interpreters. When the government previously held immigrant children at a military site, a government watchdog found that children endured panic attacks and widespread anxiety and distress, in part because of the operational challenges inherent to using a military base for civil detention.

4. Historic Expansion of Immigration Detention

• The administration will also utilize funds from reconciliation to expand immigration detention in the United States to unprecedented levels. Taxpayer funds will enrich private prison executives who have openly expressed their unfettered excitement about the Trump administration’s expansion plans. Local communities never come close to reaping the economic gains that go straight to the private prison companies.
• Immigration detention is already dangerous, with medical negligence contributing to numerous deaths; its expansion will lead to more preventable deaths and suffering. In early March, for example, Maksym Chernyak became the third man to die at the Krome Detention Center in Florida in the past five months. He had entered the U.S. through the United for Ukraine (U4U) program. Mr. Chernyak’s wife has told the media that her husband was sick, and ICE did not give him the proper medical treatment.
• In Krome and other ICE facilities throughout the country, increased raids and enforcement actions are leading to quickly deteriorating conditions including overcrowding, inadequate medical care and nutrition, and insufficient access to toilets and water. More money will mean a quick growth in detention capacity with even worse conditions sure to follow. The administration has proven it will not use incoming funds for oversight or improved conditions, having recently completely shuttered the entire suite of oversight offices that provided case management and oversight of conditions within ICE detention.

5. Massive Expansion of Family Detention

• The administration would also use additional funds to dramatically expand family detention, a barbaric practice Trump’s DHS has recently revived despite widespread consensus by medical and child welfare experts that it poses serious risks to children and their caregivers. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, even short periods of detention can cause psychological trauma and long-term mental health risks for children. During the first Trump administration, DHS’s own medical experts spoke out after witnessing children in detention enduring life-threatening weight loss, severe finger injuries because of the prison-like design of their surroundings, and medical negligence such as a 27 day-old baby experiencing a seizure from bleeding inside his skull that went undetected during the baby’s arrival at the facility.

6. Increased Fast-Track Deportations

• DHS will also use more funds to hire officers and staff to facilitate detentions and deportations of community members using the “expedited removal” process, which short circuits due process and risks erroneous deportations. Expedited removal is a fast-track immigration process used by DHS to deport individuals and families from the U.S. without ever seeing an immigration judge. One of the Trump administration’s first immigration-related actions was to expand its authority to use expedited removal anywhere in the United States for people who cannot quickly prove they have resided here for longer than two years.
• Because expedited removal happens quickly and without any review by an immigration judge, its expanded use will almost certainly result in erroneous detentions and deportations of lawful residents and U.S. citizens who are unable to immediately prove their status.

7. Criminal Prosecution of Migrants, Leading to Family Separations

• Money funneled through reconciliation would also go toward hiring more federal prosecutors to ramp up criminal prosecutions of people for immigration related offenses, and for increased federal detention space for their imprisonment. The Trump administration revoked a prior executive order that directed the closure of federal private prisons in its efforts to create federal detention space. The federal criminal offenses of unauthorized entry and reentry were originally drafted by lawmakers with openly racist agendas involving the philosophy of eugenics, and their use has been plagued by due process and fairness problems. These offenses also served as the basis for the first Trump administration’s family separation policy known as “zero tolerance.”
• Increased prosecutions of migration-related offenses will allow DOJ to continue tactics it has already begun to explore that undermine due process and asylum rights and separate families, recalling the zero tolerance horrors. In one recent case, agents used a judicial warrant for the offense of illegal entry to arrest a husband and wife who were returning home from work, in front of their young children, despite the fact that they had lived in the United States for years and had Temporary Protected Status.

8. More Electronic Surveillance & Screening

• Most arriving visitors and returning residents are familiar with certain routine screenings at U.S. airports and ports of entry, but increasingly visa holders and green card holders are reporting detentions and heightened scrutiny during travel. The reconciliation bill threatens to remake airport security processes, making travel cumbersome and invasive for noncitizens and citizens alike. More DHS funds will mean more staffing and technology for enhanced screenings, phone and computer seizures, and airport detentions. These screenings will disproportionately fall on people of already marginalized backgrounds and national origin who the administration profiles. As noted above, the administration has shut down the agency tasked with investigating violations of civil rights and religious discrimination.
• ICE also operates a surveillance and monitoring program referred to as the Alternatives to Detention or “ATD” program. A private prison contractor handles the program under a $2.2 billion contract that expires this year. More funding would likely mean renewal and dramatic expansion of this program, which restricts the freedom of movement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants through 24-hour location tracking. The harms caused by this pervasive surveillance is widely documented, including burns, electric shocks, and mental trauma.

9. Border Wall Construction

• President Trump has long touted his commitment to build a border wall, and with hundreds of billions of dollars he will most certainly make good on this promise regardless of the human and environmental toll. Medical experts have detailed the horrific injuries migrants suffer because of efforts to build a higher and expanded border wall. Advocacy groups have also documented border wall construction’s irreparable impact on the environment and communities in border regions.
• A broad coalition of advocacy groups and state and local governments oppose more border wall construction. Border barriers do not deter smuggling or increase security, but they do cut through tribal lands, push people to dangerous crossings where death awaits, and cause environmental devastation.

10. Targeting Students and Scholars with Opposing Views for Deportation

• In a period of only months, the Department of State and DHS have created a pervasive sense of fear among student activists and scholars who are in the United States on visas or with lawful permanent resident status. The government has revoked more than 300 student visas, partnering with immigration enforcement officials to undertake chilling arrests as a means of retaliating against students for their activism or speech in support of Palestinian rights or other issues that do not align with the President’s world view. This behavior is authoritarian in nature and ignores long-term damage to the U.S. education system and worldwide standing.
• The reconciliation bill will empower DHS to engage in even more brazen tactics to spread fear and chill the exercise of First Amendment rights. The world has now seen the shocking video of a hooded un-uniformed agent grabbing Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street and whisking her, terrified, into an SUV. We can only imagine how much more brutal and widespread these tactics can be with the infusion of funds envisioned by the reconciliation bill.

Congress must reject these harmful budgetary choices

The Trump administration is using immigration enforcement as a tool to undermine constitutional protections and fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and association. This attack is already destabilizing communities and making all of us less safe. Attendance at schools is visibly dropping in some places as parents are afraid to send their children. People are afraid to go to work, leaving local economies vulnerable. A “yes” vote on a bill providing hundreds of billions of dollars to extend this agenda will be a stamp of approval on increasingly lawless actions that put us all at risk. NILC urges all members of Congress to oppose the reconciliation bill.

Additional Resources:

• Budget Reconciliation and Immigration Policy: Potential Areas of Impact for 2025
• Existing Restrictions on Immigrants’ Eligibility for Federal Assistance Leave Little Left to Cut