Washington D.C. – Over the weekend, President Biden signed a massive $1.2 trillion government funding bill that would significantly increase anti-immigrant funding to the highest level it has been since the Trump administration. The bill included a dramatic spike in funding for ICE to surveil immigrant communities through its harmful tracking and ankle monitor surveillance program, growing from roughly $442 million to now well over $470 million. It also allocates over $3 million for ICE to detain over 40,000 people in detention facilities and alarmingly gives ICE and CBP billions more to carry out their violent assaults against immigrant communities.
Cynthia Garcia, Co-Organizing Director at United We Dream, said:
“Since the start of his administration, President Biden’s funding for ICE and CBP has grown exponentially, demonstrating a deep betrayal of his promises to usher in a pro-immigrant future for the country. MAGA extremists’ have always used the government spending package as a vehicle to ram through exorbitant funding to ICE and CBP, all in an effort to further their anti-immigrant agenda and block communities who are struggling across the country from getting the resources they actually need to live and survive. This spending bill caves to that far-right agenda and fails the very people the President vowed to protect.
Time and again, our communities have been told there is not enough money for the vital resources we need to survive. This latest spending bill continues to prove that couldn’t be further from the truth. Immigrant young people, young people of color, and our allies demand genuine investments in our futures and policy solutions that urgently address the needs of our communities, including funding for education, job security, healthcare and housing, not billions for border militarization, enforcement agents, and detention beds. Each dollar that goes to ICE and CBP has real and sometimes irreversible consequences, including maintaining the very infrastructure of detention facilities where people like Charles Leo Daniel died this month after spending nearly 1,500 days in solitary confinement. The Biden Administration cannot continue down this road of aligning with far-right, anti-immigrant extremists whose only intention is to fund this deadly machine. They must immediately reverse course and demonstrate a true commitment to investing in our safety and futures.”
