The One Big Bill the Trump administration includes a massive expansion of funding for “border security,” ICE, and other anti-immigrant functions of the Department of Fatherland Security. This will produce a corresponding massive increase in corruption.
Consider the U.S. Coast Guard, which had — and still has — an annual budget of around $14 billion. Since next year’s budget is pretty much the same as last year’s budget, they know where that money has gotta go and thus where that money is gonna go.
But ICE and DHS are getting a ton of new money, tens of billions of dollars only vaguely designated for vague purposes. It’s new money, not needed money, and so where it’s gotta go and where it’s gonna go are open questions.
That creates a gold rush for grifters and scammers and unscrupulous contractors of every sort who will be scrambling for a piece of the pie. All that money makes such a succulent sound.
This would be true of any agency or entity experiencing such an abrupt and massive expansion. If such a thing as a benevolent billionaire existed and tbey waved a magic wand to suddenly quadruple the annual funding for, say, Doctors Without Borders, the grifters and scammers would swoop in like vultures, looking for a way to divert some of that money into their own pockets and crypto wallets. But corruption would be more difficult to pull off in that case because every penny of that new funding would be desperately needed and everyone involved would already know precisely where it could and should be spent.
In the case of ICE, the need for all this money is not urgent, or well-defined, or well-understood. Lots of this money could easily go missing — 10 million here, 10 million there — with no one noticing, or caring, since every existing part of the agency is already enjoying it’s own bonanza of extravagant over-budgeting.
Add to this the fact that the Trump administration has already DOGE’d away every government watchdog, inspector general, GAO researcher, etc. — meaning nobody is watching where this money is going — and it’s basically open season.
The big, round figures being widely reported suggest the new law tosses some $170 billion to $200 billion to DHS, which includes around $50 billion to build a wall across the southern border, $45 billion to build new detention centers and camps, $27 for transporting deportees, and $8 billion to recruit and retain ICE officers.
You will not live long enough to count to any of those numbers, but to put them in some perspective, think again of that annual budget for the U.S. Coast Guard. It’s $14 billion a year used to be much larger than the $10 billion or so designated for ICE. Now ICE will be getting more than 10 times what the Coast Guard will.
I would guess that the $50 billion committed to “build the wall” across the southern border will wind up being the biggest boondoggle in this budget. If even half of that $50 billion actually goes to construction of an actual wall I would be surprised.
Where will it go instead? Who knows? The Cayman Island account of some shell company owned by a shell company owned by a shell company. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are just going to evaporate — poof! — never to be seen again by anyone who isn’t already an oligarch in the 1% of the 1%.
Billionaires stealing billions from taxpayers is, of course, a Bad Thing, and yet I’m still somewhat ambivalent about all of that pending corruption, because stealing billions from taxpayers to actually build an actual wall is also a Bad Thing. The builders of such walls always start out by insisting that they’re being built to keep people out, but those walls always — always, always, always — wind up existing to keep people in. So flamboyant corruption is a Bad Thing but the flamboyant corruption that will divert tens of billions of dollars from that second Bad Thing is, in a sense, less bad. Maybe. Sort of.
That’s also true of some of the extreme corruption that will swallow 50% or more of the $45 billion tabbed to build new camps and detention centers. Hundreds of millions of those dollars will simply be absorbed by the layers upon layers of middlemen who will sniff out the opportunity created by this huge new unaccountable slush fund. There will be consultants hired to select the consultants who will hire more consultants, with each tier taking a cut of the spending like a club sandwich of corruption. All of that will be shady, but probably still technically legal. But then there will also be more extreme forms of corruption. Years from now we will learn about phantom detention centers — movie-set facades that collected years of funding to feed and house phantom detainees who existed only as fake names on a computer screen.
We’ve already had hints of this sort of thing, even before ICE’s budget was turbo-charged by the Big Bill. There have already been reports of private detention centers collecting funds for detainees who did not exist. Shoveling another $45 billion out the window and putting it up for grabs is a massive incentive for all kinds of fraud.
Here, again, I’m ambivalent about some of the fraud and corruption this slush fund is going to produce across America. If some grifter creates a phantom detention center filled with imaginary detainees, then every dollar he scams away is a dollar that cannot otherwise be spent on Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance’s ethnic-cleansing crusade to Make America White Again. Fraud and corruption of that sort might be not just ethically defensible, but ethically obligatory. (I am still re-reading The Hiding Place. The devout Dutch Reformed ten Boom family absolutely believed that fraud and corruption to siphon away Nazi assets was an ethical, and religious — and Calvinist! — obligation. This was also, you’ll recall, the m.o. at the heart of Schindler’s List.)
I can envision Nathan Ford in an episode of Leverage telling his band of merry outlaws “Let’s go steal a detention center.” If the oligarchs and their cronies and toadies are going to enrich themselves by feeding at this trough with impunity, perhaps some heroes could Robin Hood away some of those funds as well and put them to use for good instead of evil.
But, alas, that happy fantasy is still just a fantasy. The real, ugly corruption we’re about to see from this mega-billions slush fund for detention centers and camps will mostly come in the form of shoddy, unsafe construction, nearly starvation-level feeding of detainees, and grossly inadequate medical facilities for them. The so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in the Everglades was constructed by some of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ biggest donors and closest cronies. They built it in just a few weeks. They also may have built it to last just a few weeks. Corners will be cut, precautions will be ignored, standards will be lowered. These folks are going to make the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. look responsible by comparison.
The kind of people willing to take billions of dollars to detain innocent people who are being denied every legal protection are the kind of people who will not care at all if those detainees suffer or die in their care. There is not, and never has been, any such thing as an honest concentration camp operator driven by concern for the rights, well-being, or dignity of the detainees they hold. The corruption of these camp-builders and camp-operators will only be exceeded by their depravity and cruelty.
That leaves the $8 or $10 billion apparently designated for the recruiting and retention of ICE agents — a sum nearly equal to the entirety of the agency’s budget for previous years. The ambition here is to turn this federal secret police force into the largest such agency in the world. With that kind of money being thrown at recruiting and retention, that seems likely, but it turns out that instant, exponential growth for any such agency is an extremely difficult thing to pull off.
There’s a reason, after all, that D-Day was in 1944 and not in 1942. Even FDR couldn’t massively expand the Army in one year. And nobody in the Trump administration has anything like the leadership skills of an FDR.
Journalists Garret Graff and John Pfaff have both written good reports on how difficult it would be to suddenly and massively grow ICE and Border Patrol, showing how much less ambitious attempts at rapid growth have failed and foundered. “Trump‘s megabill gives billions to ICE — but hiring 10,000 new agents won’t be easy,” Pfaff writes. The headline for Graff’s piece is more straightforward: “Spending $200 Billion on ICE Is a Terrible Idea.”
This new effort isn’t a new beat for Graff. He’s done detailed reporting on earlier efforts to boost the size of Border Patrol:
What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.
I spent nearly five years reporting heavily on the decade-long epidemic of corruption that paralyzed the Border Patrol after its ill-conceived Bush-era post-9/11 hiring surge—including interviewing every single person who had served as commissioner of CBP, visiting detention facilities, and even doing ride-alongs on the southern border by truck, boat, and helicopter. The Border Patrol’s hiring surge doubled the size of the force in just a few years, from about 9,200 to 18,000, a move roughly equivalent to (but still less than!) what we’re about to see happen with ICE.
… As CBP’s then-commissioner, Gil Kerlikowske, told me back in 2014, “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” Anyone familiar with policing can rattle off the police hiring surges that inevitably led to spikes in corruption—including mistakes like the 1980 Miami police hiring surge and the infamous Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies saw widespread corruption problems that took years to fix.
All of this happened with the Border Patrol. CBP and the Border Patrol hired cartel members and even a serial killer—and put them out in the field with inadequate training and supervision. According to two people I interviewed who had been involved in the hiring process, the Border Patrol regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks.
Pfaff has similar worries that screening and standards might get washed away by the new flood of money for hiring and recruitment, but he also just doesn’t think they’ll be able to find more applicants even if they expanded eligibility to include cartel members and serial killers and Proud Boys and Oathkeepers.
I very much hope they’re both right about this and that the agency’s goal of doubling or tripling the size of its domestic army may not be possible even with billions of dollars to spend.
The corruption that will absolutely and certainly follow the creation of this new ICE slush fund is a certainty. The only aspect of that about which I am not certain is whether or not any of that corruption will be something that can be tied directly to Trump himself or to his family organization. I would guess yes, but I would also guess that this will not matter to his supporters. Steve Bannon, after all, was already found to have defrauded thousands of the MAGA faithful with his own personal “Build the Wall” scam. He pocketed the money — their money, their donations, without contributing anything to “the wall.” And yet his reputation in MAGA-world remains undiminished.
There are just so many forms of corruption. And we’re about to see a speed-run of all of them. Welcome to the Boomtown.
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