Militarizing peaceful cities, spraying legal protesters with noxious chemicals, breaking down doors, pulling half-naked families out of bed and into the street — this is the United States we find ourselves in now.

Seemingly indifferent to Constitutional protections and due process, the Trump administration continues to expand imprisonments and deportations while seeking to intimidate immigrants and their supporters.

What the National Immigration Law Center describes as the tragically misnamed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” strips many lawfully present immigrants of access to health insurance and nutrition aid and deprives millions of families of the anti-poverty benefits of the Child Tax Credit.

What’s more, the bill funds a massive expansion of the immigration detention and enforcement budget while under-mining due process and humanitarian protections. The law provides Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) with an astronomical $170 for enforcement and deportation operations and for building new immigration detention centers. That is nearly triple the total amount of ICE’s previous budget.

How else will the money be spent?

As the National Immigration Law Center reports, the bill also directs funds to be used for:

  • Expedited removal processes that short-cut due process and allow for rapid-fire deportations without a day in court;
  • A program empowering state and local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration enforcement activities, incentivizing racial profiling and abuses; and
  • Extra-territorial processing of asylum claims, most likely through a program forcubf asylum seekers to wait in dangerous conditions in Mexico while their U.S. court cases proceed.

Struggling to meet Trump’s one million annual deportation goal, ICE is seeking to expand its workforce by 10,000 agents. It is offering signing bonuses up to $50,000, student loan forgiveness, and removing age restrictions, as well as recruiting former federal and local law enforcement.

Recently, Federal courts have sought to constrain parts of the administration’s anti-immigrant campaign. On August 29, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia forbade the rapid removal of immigrants who have been in the country for more than two years. Two days later, the same court blocked the deportation of some migrant children from Guatemala who crossed the border alone.

On September 2, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the administration’s use of the arcane Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members without due process. The administration has appealed all these rulings. All are likely to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which will also decide the fate of Trump’s desire to end the birthright citizenship clause in the U.S. Constitution.

Legal efforts have blocked some of the Administration’s most egregious anti-immigrant actions, at least temporarily. But as ICE takes advantage of a massively expanded workforce, resources, and legal powers, it seems clear that Trump’s attacks on immigrants can only grow increasingly widespread and malicious.

This article appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of UIDN’s Update.