Right now, members of the Senate are considering the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives in May. This sweeping piece of legislation covers many different areas, including immigration. Before the bill passed in the House, several bishop chairmen of the USCCB wrote to Congress to commend certain provisions and to urge reconsideration of others that would irreparably harm the poor and disadvantaged, as well as our immigrant brothers and sisters.
In the context of immigration, some of the things the House-passed bill would do include:
- Allocate $25 billion for immigration enforcement efforts and $45 billion for detention, including family detention. This amounts to a nearly 400% increase annually when compared to current funding levels. Families, including those with young children, would be left to languish in costly and harmful detention facilities. Enforcement efforts would be expanded well beyond those who committed crimes to include people who have peacefully contributed to American communities for years, even decades.
- Provide $100 million to facilitate the expedited removal of unaccompanied children without any access to legal counsel, overriding current protections for this population.
- Impose prohibitive fees for families seeking to reunite with an unaccompanied child. Family members and other safe sponsors would first be required to pay a $3,500 fee as “reimbursement” for the time a child spent in federal custody, as well as a $5,000 bond, before being able to care for that child. This combined $8,500 would keep many children from their families and increase costs for the government to continue caring for them.
- Make life-saving protections contingent on one’s ability to pay for them without any potential for fee waivers. For instance, all requests for asylum would require a mandatory $1,000 fee (currently, there is no fee for asylum applications).
- Require a $550 initial work authorization application fee for those with pending asylum claims and renewal every six months (instead of five years), leading already vulnerable people trying to support themselves and their families to rely on public or charitable assistance and making them more susceptible to labor exploitation.
- Impose a $250 “visa integrity fee”—on top of the fees already paid—for every person who receives a nonimmigrant visa, such as religious workers.
In their letter to Congress, the bishops described these provisions as doubling down on an “unsustainable, enforcement-only approach to immigration” and “contrary to the common good.” Ask your senators to remain consistent in protecting human life and dignity and promoting the common good by addressing these harmful provisions before moving the reconciliation bill forward.
