If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you have $75 billion over four years in new funding for ICE, you — Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan — will use it to fund a huge domestic army to round up four million people in the next three years, put them in “detention centers” and deport them.
If these cruel men planned to go after criminals, as they claimed, they would have needed only a fraction of the money that Republican lawmakers just gave them. And ending the genuine shortfall in the Department of Homeland Security budget doesn’t require this kind of dough.
So with virtually unlimited funds, they’ll make up for lost time. We’re already witnessing swarms of masked agents grabbing people off the street. Within weeks, it’ll get a lot worse. The grandma who has been here for 30 years paying taxes; the Dreamer college student who has been thoroughly American since he was a toddler; the small business owner who gets a traffic ticket — 3,000 of them a day will be ripped from their families, sent to a prison and shipped to a country where they don’t know anyone.
Count on it. The iron law of government budgeting is use-it-or-lose-it. Only bureaucratic fools have money left over at the end of the fiscal year. ICE will spend billions on meeting Chief Homan’s arbitrary and inhumane quotas — the same kind of arrest quotas that drive police states all over the world, as Ronan Farrow has explained.
And the thousands of new Border Patrol agents? They already bring to mind those old ads about the Maytag Repairman — waiting in vain for something to happen. With border crossings plummeting, it’s only a matter of time before they’re shifted north for an even heavier presence in blue urban America.
Before long, many of us won’t even notice the roundups, just as white Californians in 1942 didn’t pay much heed when their Japanese-American neighbors were whisked away to detention camps in the desert.
That was an inexcusable act, but the conditions in those camps, while spare and dehumanizing, were not as bad as in the “Alligator Alcatraz” that Trump is gloating over. These will be jails — not camps — built to be as close to the abusive Salvadoran model as the president can make them. And the scale of his migrant gulag is much larger. All told, about 120,000 Japanese were interned. The capacity of the new detention centers is planned to be roughly 120,000 per day.
With most detainees only weeks or months from deportation, that means millions of new migrants cycling through. Many will have done nothing worse than Trump’s German immigrant grandparents (and my Jewish grandmother) did a century ago, namely, overstaying their visas. Of course, if they happen to be employed at a golf course or hotel (exempted by Trump for obvious personal reasons), they wouldn’t be in jail in the first place. Here’s where we’re headed: If migrants work on farms or in slaughterhouses (lots of both in red states), or a kitchen (hospitality), they’re OK or maybe even headed for amnesty, as Trump—to the dismay of MAGA—hinted last week. But if they cut grass, clean houses, or work in other occupations unprotected by the Dear Leader, off to jail you go.
Look, I’m appalled by almost everything in the Big Ugly Bill. (The exceptions are the slight expansion of the Child Tax Credit and “Trump Accounts” — baby bonds that are a good idea and can be made bigger over time.) The cuts to the social safety net are much worse than the ones I covered at the beginning of the Reagan Administration. Thousands of people will delay going to the doctor when they’re sick and will die earlier than they would otherwise. And the “Big Ugly” is an IED set to explode inside state budgets.
But we have more reasons for hope on Medicaid than we do on mass deportation. Several Republicans know that these provisions hurt their voters, and they claim they will try to restore at least some of the money. Even if they’re lying about that (a good bet), the nasty enrollment obstacles can be at least partially overcome. Non-profits will develop apps to cut through the burdensome paperwork that Trumpsters assume will dissuade many poorer Americans from applying for benefits, and volunteers can go door-to-door to make sure people know how to use them (a good way to feel useful in the Trump era). And if Democrats take the House in 2026, which is likely, they can use the appropriation process to make sure that at least some of the “Trumpcare” cuts scheduled for 2027 are not carried out.
By contrast, the money for ICE seems more locked in. Democrats will be afraid to cut it. And the numbers are huge: $45 billion for “immigration detention capacity” will make that budget more than 30 percent larger than that of the entire U.S. federal prison system, which already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. And nearly $30 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation will make ICE larger than almost every army in the world.
On top of this, Congress might as well tear down the Statue of Liberty and flush Emma Lazarus’s poem down the toilet. For those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Trump capped the number of immigration judges at 800. This means the record backlogs in asylum cases will get a lot worse.
Ever since the emergence of the anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” Party in the 1850s, American attitudes toward immigration have always moved along a sine curve. In the late 19th Century, fears of a “Yellow Peril” led to racist restrictions on Asian immigration. The mean-spirited Immigration Act of 1924 essentially barred anyone who wasn’t from northern Europe and set the stage for the SS St. Louis tragedy (German Jews rebuffed at a Cuban port in 1939, with many returning to die in the Holocaust). In the 1930s and 1940s, around two million migrants — mostly Mexican — were deported, often on vessels that resembled slave ships, and in 1955, President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” led to the rapid deportation of 250,000 Mexicans.
Each of these outbreaks of nativism was followed by periods of tolerance and greater appreciation of our true heritage as a nation of immigrants.
Polls show that Americans want secure borders, but they don’t favor mass deportation. The pushback has already begun, with cell phone cameras helping bear witness to roundups, aggressive litigation, and pledges by state and local Democratic officeholders not to help ICE, which Trump will try and fail to do anything about. (No, he cannot arrest Zohran Mamdani.)
For the last century, police states have foundered more often than they have endured. Demagogues and persecutors don’t look good in the eyes of their descendants. Stephen Miller will learn someday that history is a hammer, too, and he will be one of its nails.
This week, Princeton professor Julian Zelizer and I are re-launching a shorter version (only five minutes!) of our chats that put today’s events in historical context. So look for Then and Now: Internment Camps coming to you this weekend.
PS I hated that the only button to like your column is a heart. Because this ICE thing is the most cruel thing I have witnessed our country doing in my lifetime, and as you said, it makes the shameful internment of Japanese Americans during WW II look like a party (so this may be up there with among the most shameful things that America has done post Civil War, up there with abandoning Black Americans to Southern retribution after Reconstruction was ended
ICE is just 2025 version of Hitler’s BROWNSHIRTS