President Donald Trump signed the GOP’s massive tax and funding cuts bill into law on July 4, meeting his self-imposed deadline, in an outdoor ceremony attended by hundreds of supporters and military jets flying over the White House.
The newly minted law will fund many of Trump’s domestic policies, including his immigration crackdown, resulting in nearly $170 billion to support the administration’s border goals.
The final bill, as detailed by NPR, allocates $45 billion for immigration detention centers, around $30 billion to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for transportation costs, and to maintain ICE facilities.
Additionally, roughly $46.5 billion has been earmarked to complete Trump’s border wall—a campaign promise he’s been repeating for nearly a decade—and includes $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and $10 billion for other border security initiatives. Approximately $13.5 billion will be set aside to reimburse states and local governments for their assistance with immigration and border-related enforcement.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cleared the Senate and House in an expedited push marked by intra-party fighting, includes several provisions aimed at taking additional money out of immigrant pockets, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Through cuts to benefits and added or increased fees, immigrants, both documented and not, will be paying a sizable amount of the cost to fund the president’s agenda.
Details of the legislation include not allowing children who are US citizens and have parents without legal status to be eligible for the child tax credit—an annual financial break for families to help defray the cost of raising children. The move is estimated to make 2.6 million children ineligible for the $2,200 credit. Young immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) will also no longer be eligible for subsidies through the Affordable Care Act. Several other groups of immigrants, including visa holders, will now be prohibited from buying insurance through the ACA.
And, refugees and immigrants who won their asylum cases—groups of people often fleeing life-threatening situations in their home countries—are also now, under the GOP bill, ineligible for programs including Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Benefits that add up to more than $60 billion.
Those seeking asylum in the US will also now be subject to a $100 application fee, starting in fiscal year 2025. The administration’s decision to impose this new financial hurdle makes the US one of the few countries that charge a price for seeking humanitarian protection. That’s not the only additional fee added to asylum seekers; as the WSJ notes, this group will also be required to pay $100 for each year they wait in an asylum backlog, $550 each year to renew a work permit, and should asylum seekers want to appeal a denial, they will have to shell out $900 to have an appeals body review their claims. That same appeal, before the bill was passed, cost $110.
“Separately, anyone issued a temporary visa, such as a tourist, student, or work visa, will be required to pay a new $ 250’ visa integrity fee’ in addition to existing fees for respective visa categories,” the WSJ’s Michelle Hackman and Jack Gillum write. “Many of these fees,” they continue, “are written as minimums, meaning Trump or any future administration could jack them up even higher.”
The bill also introduces a new tax on individuals sending funds to people they know in another country, also known as “remittances.” It’s the first of its kind tax aimed at cutting into monies traditionally sent from immigrants to their loved ones. These transactions will incur a 1% tax—down from 5% in an earlier version of the bill. (Last month, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri introduced a bill that would tax remissions at 15%.)
As Quartz reports, “Those using a cashier’s check, money order, and cash would be subject to the new tax. The remittance tax wouldn’t be collected if it’s paid with a U.S.-issued credit or debit card.” Digital transfers from bank accounts and other financial institutions, as well as cryptocurrency and stablecoins, are also exempt.
Currently, crossing the border into the US without proper documentation is considered a federal misdemeanor. Trump’s new bill requires undocumented immigrants detained by immigration enforcement to pay a $5,000 nonwaivable fee. The legislation also creates a $5,000 fee for immigrants deported at court hearings they don’t attend—a chilling addition as ICE officials have been lying in wait to detain immigrants at their court hearings. The government is expected to provide guidance on the timings of fees within the coming days.
If immigrants are unable to pay these fees when the administration demands, the government will have new leeway to bring criminal charges to those who committed a misdemeanor.
These expected additional fines and fees from the new GOP bill add onto an already large sum of monies provided by undocumented immigrants that fund American programs.
According to a July 2024 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-profit think tank, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, more than a third of which went toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are barred from accessing. Following Trump’s new bill, undocumented immigrants are poised to pay even more for programs that they either don’t benefit from or are directly designed to target them.
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