The House of Representatives recently passed its budget reconciliation spending bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1). The bill changes numerous aspects of tax and spending law, but its most significant spending increases are for immigration. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill will direct an astounding $168 billion of the budget to immigration and border law enforcement, and there is even more for agencies that indirectly support immigration law enforcement.
However, the CBO’s cost estimate is deficient in three ways. First, CBO assumes that all this increase is temporary, and second, it will happen gradually over the next 10 years, rather than in an immediate, reckless spending spree. Most importantly, it neglects the more significant cost of removing immigrants who would have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits. Properly considered, the actual cost of H.R. 1’s immigration enforcement spending is nearly $1 trillion more than the CBO estimates. When seen in the context of the overall costs of the bill, mass deportation would account for almost a quarter of the bill’s total price tag.
Congress, not CBO, is primarily to blame for these flaws. The CBO must assess the immigration legislation at face value, and under its terms, the legislation provides only a one-time boost to spending. Moreover, CBO must score the bill in accordance with the instructions provided by Congress. Clearly, some members did not want to see an accurate score of mass deportation.
Immigration enforcement spending is already extreme.
The $168 billion is, by itself, an unimaginable sum. Without H.R. 1, Congress had already appropriated twice as much money to America’s border police as all other federal law enforcement combined. In FY 2025, immigration and border enforcement accounted for at least two-thirds of all federal law enforcement. The actual value is even higher right now because the Trump administration is diverting thousands of agents from other federal law enforcement agencies and much of the military to enforcing immigration and border law.
In FY 2025—again, before H.R. 1—Congress allocated nearly $34 billion to immigration and border enforcement agencies. That’s 36 times more than what is provided for tax and financial crimes enforcement (IRS-Treasury), 21 times more than funding for firearms enforcement (ATF), 13 times more than drug enforcement (DEA), and 8 times more than the FBI budget to enforce effectively everything else. The level of border police spending is already so extreme that it has swamped nearly all other criminal law enforcement priorities for the federal government.
H.R. 1 immigration enforcement spending is unimaginable.
The House plans to distort this wildly out-of-whack law enforcement system beyond recognition. H.R. 1 appropriates $168 billion to agencies whose primary purpose is immigration enforcement. It adds $1.2 billion to all other law enforcement for the Secret Service. This sum comes on top of the $33 billion, meaning that if this bill passes, about $200 billion will be made available for immigration enforcement starting in FY 2025.
Unlike normal fiscal year appropriations, H.R. 1 makes the funds available over a 5‑year period, and technically, the spending can stretch out over 10 years as long as it is “obligated” before 2029. The CBO assumes a business-as-usual spending pattern where the spending slowly ramps up and then slowly ramps down over 10 years. But this is based on CBO’s baseline spend-down patterns, which is absurd here.
The Trump administration desperately wants to spend this money immediately. It is even plausible that they could blow through this money by next year and demand more from Congress. It is already stealing from other agencies and the military to do enforcement, and it is currently spending money for ICE appropriated for the end of the year. The bill appears to confirm this more aggressive timeline by mandating the hiring of 10,000 ICE agents for a cost of $8 billion—$800,000 per agent. It costs ICE about $200,000 in compensation per agent per year (p. 12), meaning that $8 billion is only enough to employ these agents for four years. The same math applies to CBP personnel.
A more realistic position is that the Trump administration will use almost all this authority over the next four years. In this scenario, the government will spend nearly $80 billion annually on immigration enforcement in 2028. This is nearly half the amount all the states spend on local policing nationwide to improve public safety, and the $80 billion would be five times more than all other federal law enforcement combined. Nearly the same situation would occur in 2029 under the CBO’s assumptions when 78 percent of all federal law enforcement would be immigration. Either way, immigration enforcement would dwarf the rest of federal law enforcement.
However, both scenarios assume that Congress will aggressively cut immigration enforcement after 2029. Budget analysts have questioned this assumption when it comes to tax cuts, but it is particularly egregious when it comes to immigration spending. Congress does not—and will not—cut immigration enforcement like this. H.R. 1 requires increased pay for all Border Patrol and ICE agents, hiring thousands of new agents, and new detention facility contracts. While the “wall” may be complete, the wall maintenance will likely be as much as half the cost of construction.
Congress is not going to let the wall collapse, force the firing of hundreds of unionized law enforcement officers, or drastically cut their pay. These outcomes will not happen, even under a President Kamala Harris, but obviously not if the Republicans maintain control, which is what this bill is intended to accomplish. If Congress chooses to maintain just half of H.R. 1’s 2028 immigration spending level, the bill will end up costing more than $100 billion more than advertised by 2035.
H.R. 1 will cause a drastic reduction in the immigrant population.
The CBO does not directly estimate how all of this spending will affect immigrants.
- ICE is required to hire at least 10,000 new agents, which would more than double the number of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) agents.
- The overall ICE budget would triple by 2028.
- The ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations budget would nearly quadruple by 2028.
- The detention budget would more than quadruple by 2028.
- The “transportation and removal” budget would increase fivefold.
Currently, about 50,000 people are detained, so this means that ICE would likely be detaining more than 200,000 people at a time once the funding kicks in. Most of the detention capacity already exists. ICE just needs to sign the contracts, which it would do immediately. During Trump’s first term, there were about 10 detentions in a year for every detention bed available, implying that at least 2 million people would be detained annually under H.R. 1.
- CBP would get $5 billion to construct and expand its own detention facilities. This year, it received just $50 million to construct Border Patrol facilities. Border Patrol has the capacity to detain 12,000 people at a time now. We can reasonably expect this number to at least triple under this bill and be immediately co-opted for mass deportation efforts.
- H.R. 1 also appropriates $3.4 billion for state and local immigration enforcement efforts. CBP would also receive at least 8,500 new CBP agents, including 3,000 for Border Patrol.
- The bill would spend $46.5 billion on border wall construction.
All this money is fungible, and with the exception of the border wall funding for political reasons, almost all of it will ultimately be used for mass deportation. That includes the so-called “border security” money. The administration is already diverting border agents to interior operations, such as prowling around Home Depots and farms.
In addition, the bill imposes an estimated $65 billion in fees on immigrants seeking to stay in the United States. This raises revenue, but it will effectively price out most applicants in immigration proceedings from receiving legal status to remain here. This will lead to more deportations and “voluntary” exits. It is also important to understand that ICE and CBP are already regularly arresting and removing legal immigrants, so massively increasing their activity would deter many legal immigrants from coming or staying in the United States.
Combined with Trump’s policy changes that expedite removal for immigrants in the interior, we can reasonably expect that:
- Deportations would increase fivefold to over one million per year;
- Voluntary exits triggered by the deportations (both from families whose parent/spouse is gone as well as others fearful of what will happen) would increase proportionally to 500,000 per year;
- Illegal immigration and asylum seekers would not return to the trend from its currently historically low level; and
- Legal immigration would decline by at least 15 percent, due to deterrence and fewer people able to sponsor them.
Altogether, over the five years when we expect the funding to be in effect, we can predict net immigration to fall by about 8 million, with an additional million lost in later years (again, keeping with Congress’ constructed reality that none of the increased spending will persist). Although it has not estimated how many people H.R. 1 will deport or the fiscal effects of those deportations, CBO has already estimated the fiscal effects of the 8.7 million increase in the number of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and parolees under the Biden administration. It found that this population will reduce the deficit by $897 billion over 10 years.
If Congress had permitted it to do so, CBO could have reversed its analysis to model the costs of removing this population. CBO modeled the period from 2024 to 2034 in its analysis of the Biden-era immigrants, while CBO’s score for H.R. 1 covers 2025 to 2035. CBO’s final year (2034) savings were 3.3 times the savings in the first year, so extending its analysis to 2035 to be comparable with the CBO’s score for the reconciliation bill would roughly add an additional $81 billion in savings for 2035 over the 2025–2035 period. There are some differences between the 2021–2025 immigrant surge population and long-settled illegal immigrants, but they are close enough for our purposes.
Using CBO’s numbers, it is possible to estimate that removing the 8.7 million illegal immigrants over 5 years would increase the debt by about $900 billion. The loss could double if the funding increase were made permanent.
The fiscal cost of deportation for H.R. 1 equals the cost of all other federal law enforcement spending over 10 years. When incorporating deportations, immigration costs under H.R. 1 will account for about 87 percent of all expenses for the federal government on law enforcement. The actual outlays under H.R. 1 become less significant when viewed over 10 years, but the costs imposed by the deportations dwarf all other costs.
The CBO projects that H.R. 1 will cost the federal government $2.4 trillion in spending over 10 years, not including the $561 billion in interest payments on the higher debt or the cost of mass deportation. This means that the nearly $900 billion cost of deportations will amount to about a quarter of the bill’s total cost. Mass deportation will impose deficits exceeding other significant, debated costs like the SALT cap. The Tax Foundation estimates that the tax portions of the bill will increase economic growth, which will reduce the cost of the bill by nearly $900 billion. In that scenario, mass deportation will be more like a third of the deficit from the bill.
Although CBO projections only account for costs over 10 years, I’ve previously extended this type of analysis to the lifetime of these immigrants. In that more comprehensive analysis, I found that the fiscal cost of mass deportation would be nearly $5 trillion. Whatever the time frame, immigrants are reducing the deficit and debt, so removing them will dramatically increase future debt. Hopefully, the Senate will recognize these costs and abandon the House’s flawed approach.
