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President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” was signed into law earlier this month, with Republican lawmakers celebrating a broad range of GOP victories in the massive tax-and-spending legislation.
That includes billions of dollars aimed at Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the U.S. Nearly $30 billion is marked for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alone, and $45 billion is going toward building up detention facility capacity.
House Republicans who spoke with Fox News Digital last week hailed that funding boost, even as critics of the Trump administration accuse the White House of taking too heavy a hand on the issue.
“Having that money to now be able to work on the wall along the southern border, to be able to hire more agents, to pay them more, to invest in the technology, to patrol and secure the border – it is hugely important,” Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tenn., told Fox News Digital. “If you ask President Trump, that was the most important issue of the 2024 election.”
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Rep. Michael Guest, R-Tenn., who chairs the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the detention facility funding is particularly significant.
Guest urged ICE to use those funds to ramp up “targeted” enforcement against illegal immigrants.
It comes as many on the left and some on the right have urged the Trump administration not to go too far in rounding up suspected illegal immigrants who otherwise pose no known threat to the public.
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“I think targeted enforcement, making sure that they’re going after the worst of the worst – those individuals who have either committed crimes in the United States or we learn after they released into the interior that they had committed crimes in their country origin, [or] those people who have final orders of removal,” Guest said.
“Those are the people that I believe that ICE needs to be targeting. Those are the people where you see widespread support from the American public that they want to get off the street.”
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., pointed out that ICE had been asking for that funding for some time.
“Tom Homan has done a tremendous job. He’s indicated for a while he needs more money to keep doing his job. And he’s being fought by everybody, particularly the sanctuary cities, to prevent that from happening,” Norman said. “The least we can do is provide the funding, and we did it.”
And Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., said he hoped the increased border and immigration crackdown would help fight the ongoing drug crisis still plaguing the U.S.
“So in order to have a secured border, in order get rid of these criminal, illegal aliens that are raping and murdering American citizens on the regular, we have to have a very strong immigration enforcement system,” Van Orden said.
Reps. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, and Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., highlighted the funding for Trump’s border wall and for more ICE personnel, respectively.
The bill passed the House earlier this month and was signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July.
In addition to funding immigration operations, it also extends key parts of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), rolls back some Biden administration-era green energy subsidies, and imposes new work requirements for federal aid.
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