4 Ways the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Supercharged Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

It’s been nearly a year since President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). While the legislation was advertised as a sweeping tax bill, it also allocated roughly $191 billion to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ramp up immigration enforcement. Included in this total was $75 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and $65 billion for Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Despite having the funds available through the end of FY 2029, the Trump administration released an estimated $114 billion, nearly 60 percent, of the funding allocated to DHS, ICE, and CBP within eight months of the OBBBA’s signing.

Here are some of the ways these immigration agencies have used the OBBBA funding over the last year to implement Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Flush with nearly $30 billion from the OBBBA for hiring and retaining personnel, ICE began its push to hire 10,000 new agents by offering starting salaries as high as $90,000 and offering $50,000 signing bonuses last summer. The hiring surge quickly drew criticism for multiple reasons, from using ads resembling wartime propaganda posters to lowering the minimum age requirement from 21 to 18 to concerns that the shortened ICE training program and issues with the vetting process would threaten civil liberties and lives.

Despite these concerns, however, the campaign was extremely effective and resulted in the hiring of over 12,000 ICE officers, a 120 percent increase, by the beginning of 2026. Similarly, the CBP drew from its over $2 billion in OBBBA funding for a hiring campaign that resulted in the agency reaching a new record high of 21,471 officers in June 2026.

These hiring sprees, along with over 14,000 federal agents being diverted to assist in immigration enforcement operations, led to a surge in immigration arrests. During Trump’s first year in office, the monthly immigration arrests rose from roughly 12,000 in January 2025 to over 40,000 in December 2025.

Trump’s immigration crackdown has grown far beyond the use of federal agents to conduct immigration arrests. The OBBBA set aside over $2 billion for the DHS to expand the 287(g) program and increase the number of state and local law enforcement agencies conducting immigration enforcement on behalf of ICE.

Just two months after the OBBBA’s signing, the DHS announced the number of 287(g) agreements had grown to 958 (up from 135 in January 2025) and had trained or were soon to train roughly 10,000 local law enforcement on immigration enforcement. Today, there are over 2,045 agreements across 39 states, essentially swelling the total number of local law enforcement agents conducting immigration enforcement to the tens of thousands.

Critics of the 287(g) program warn that such agreements not only run the risk of misusing local resources for civil immigration enforcement over criminal investigations, but also create public mistrust and transparency issues. In just one example of how these agreements create competing priorities for local law enforcement, a secretive memo was revealed in May barring local agencies participating in the 287(g) program from disclosing public records that include details of immigration enforcement operations without first consulting ICE, potentially in violation of many state Freedom of Information laws.

The surge in immigration arrests, along with an 87 percent decline in discretionary releases, led to a surge of people held in ICE custody. By January 2026, the number of ICE detainees rose 75 percent to a record-breaking 73,000 detainees. To accommodate this swell, the OBBBA apportioned an unprecedented $45 billion to double immigration detention capacity to over 107,000 beds.

Historically, the immigration detention network has consisted of local jails, private prisons, and ICE detention centers. But with funding from the OBBBA, DHS planned to revamp and centralize the ICE detention system by purchasing and retrofitting commercial warehouses. Former Acting Director Todd Lyons described the plan to centralize ICE detention as “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” However, by June 2026, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged his agency’s missteps in acquiring $1 billion in warehouses without proper due diligence, admitting some conversions “probably won’t work.”

Meanwhile, ICE detention facilities have faced consistent criticism for their overcrowded and inhumane conditions, medical neglect, and lack of due process. Since Trump took office, 52 people have died in ICE custody, doubling the mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody and reaching the highest rate in over a decade.

Overlaying the entire expansion of immigration enforcement is over $6 billion provided by the OBBBA for “border surveillance technologies,” including AI surveillance. Over the last year, the DHS has significantly expanded its use of technologies like facial recognition, biometric scanning, and social media monitoring to track both undocumented immigrants and American citizens.

Some examples of DHS contracts to advance the agency’s surveillance tools under the guise of border security include $30 million to Palantir’s ImmigrationOS for real-time monitoring of self-deportations, $4.6 million for iris-scanning smartphones, and $3.75 million for Clearview AI facial recognition. The DHS has also teamed up with Mobile Fortify to allow immigration agents to collect photos and biometric data like fingerprints in the field, often without consent.

Critics of such large, warrantless surveillance states capable of tracking and monitoring people warn that this kind of power can be abused and chill the exercise of civil liberties, particularly as such tools are often adopted for one purpose but inevitably redirected for another. In fact, there is already evidence that the DHS has repurposed these border security surveillance technologies to help identify and track American citizens who oppose Trump’s immigration policy agenda.