President Donald Trump is pushing to expand his hardline deportation plans into more Democratic cities, even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement is on the verge of going broke.
The agency is already about $1 billion over budget with three months left in the fiscal year and could run out of money altogether by next month, Axios reported.
ICE’s out-of-control spending, fueled by the Trump administration’s demand that at least 3,000 migrants be detained per day, has sparked concerns that the Department of Homeland Security could break the law if it doesn’t rein in its expenses.
Trump, however, doesn’t appear worried about ICE’s ballooning money problems. In a rambling, conspiracy theory-laden Truth Social post on Sunday, the president doubled down on his support for ICE agents, encouraging them to use “all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
“To achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,” Trump said.
“These, and other such cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good-paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens,” he said. “These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — and they are doing a good job of it!”
Concerns about ICE’s spending have heightened pressure to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which proposes pumping about $75 billion into ICE over the next five years. The megabill is currently being negotiated in the Senate, where some GOP senators have pushed back on proposed Medicaid cuts, raising speculation it could be defeated in the upper chamber.
Rep. Mark Amodei, the top Republican on the House DHS appropriations subcommittee, told Axios the GOP is closely watching the Senate talks: “If there’s much of a hiccup in that, those concerns are all capital ‘C’ concerns,” he said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, suggested the Trump administration may already be breaking the law.
“They are spending likely in the neighborhood of a billion dollars more at ICE than we authorized, and that’s patently illegal,” Murphy said. “They cannot invent money. They cannot print money. They don’t have the money to spend that they’re spending.”
One potential workaround for Trump if the bill fails in Congress is to declare a national emergency and redirect funds from other federal departments to ICE. The president did something similar during his first term in 2020 by diverting $3.8 billion from the Defense Department to build his border wall.
In a statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Axios: “Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s leadership, DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars.”
“President Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is critical to ensure we have the funding to secure our homeland for generations and deliver on the American people’s mandate for safety and security,” McLaughlin added.
The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from the Daily Beast.
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