ICE and CBP don’t need $85 billion more

Seeking to deport millions of men and women and children — families who often lived here for decades, many children who don’t know other countries — is contrary to Catholic faith and, more fundamentally, contrary to basic human dignity.

—Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C.; message in St. Paul, MN; 27 February 2026

ICE and CBP don’t need $85 billion more

In summer last year, Congress handed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) $170 billion for immigration enforcement with no limitations on how they spend it. The annual budget and appropriations process is one of Congress’s main tools of oversight, and handing over ungodly sums of money in this way abdicates one of their primary responsibilities. Two of DHS’s agencies, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), have used their slush funds to create detention facilities that are warehouses for people, even as last year was the deadliest ever in both ICE and CBP custody, and 2026 is on track to be even more lethal. ICE and CBP are using white nationalist propaganda and dog whistles to hire aggrieved agents and putting them in service with grossly inadequate, heavily truncated training programs. These agents are killing, injuring, and racially profiling indiscriminately, targeting even people with U.S. citizenship from birth and no criminal record or suspicion.

Now, Congress is considering another reconciliation bill to give DHS an additional $85.5 billion. Between the two years’ reconciliation bills, this would leave ICE and CBP with more than 10 and 5 times their annual budgets, respectively, and they could choose to spend these amounts in mere months on buildings, equipment, personnel, and the border wall. There are no comprehensive accounting or reporting requirements, so these funds cannot be tracked or audited.

Please use the draft email in the grey box at right (below on mobile devices) to urge Congress to reject any proposal that gives even one more dollar to ICE or CBP. Encourage them to seek rescission of last year’s reconciliation funds and return these agencies to congressional oversight and measures requiring transparency, accountability, and the protection of human and civil rights for everyone in this nation.

Background

Click here to read a document from the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU, National Immigrant Justice Center, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, and Human Rights First. This document provides more detail on ICE and CBP abuses and how programs addressing human needs could be paid by redirecting these amounts to make a positive difference in the U.S.