The budget gives $175 billion to immigration enforcement. “The orders of magnitude are going to be multiplied,” immigration experts say.

Masked immigration enforcers have swept through American cities in the months since President Donald Trump took office, using flash bangs during restaurant sweeps, slamming people’s heads into the ground, violently arresting gardeners on video, and provoking mass protests against their raids. This may only be the beginning.

The massive Senate budget bill, which passed on Tuesday and awaits a final House vote, gives Donald Trump’s administration the money to rapidly ramp up mass deportation to unprecedented levels, according to immigration experts.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will have a budget for more officers than the FBI. The nation’s immigration detention centers will have more funding than the federal Bureau of Prisons.

There may be only one limit on how fast the Trump administration can spend: how quickly it can hire.

  • Kühlschrank@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 days ago

    Shows just how far gone US congress is when they’re passing this as a budget resolution when it is obviously massively overhauling policy decisions that were made through legitimate means.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      For anyone unfamiliar with this malarkey: Reconciliation (United States Congress)

      Budget reconciliation is a special parliamentary procedure of the United States Congress set up to expedite the passage of certain federal budget legislation in the Senate. The procedure overrides the Senate’s filibuster rules, which may otherwise require a 60-vote supermajority for passage. Bills described as reconciliation bills can pass the Senate by a simple majority of 51 votes or 50 votes plus the vice president’s as the tie-breaker. The reconciliation procedure also applies to the House of Representatives, but it has minor significance there, as the rules of the House of Representatives do not have a de facto supermajority requirement.

      The Senate filibuster rules aren’t formal law. They’re rules the Senate imposed on itself over the last hundred years, and it can remove them just as easily. Both parties want these supermajority rules because they don’t want to pass bills that aren’t bipartisan.

      So Democrats would have to get 60 seats who never vote against their own party. But it doesn’t ever work that way because there are always some rotating villians in those seats. If necessary, they’ll use other dirty tricks, for instance the Parliamentarian, who blocked a minimum wage increase in 2021. Congress is Kayfabe.

      • Grapho@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 day ago

        Panem et circenses except you’re gouged for your panem and the circus is congress itself