ICE’s Budget Just Tripled. What’s Next?

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump’s recently passed megabill allocates $75 billion in extra funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tripling its budget and making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Historian and journalist Garrett Graff has covered law enforcement and democracy for the last 20 years and says it’s hard not to see the funding increase as “turbo-charging an increasingly lawless regime of immigration enforcement.” We talk to him about the implications of a radically expanded ICE. Guests: Garrett Graff, journalist and historian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for KQED Podcasts comes from the Exploratorium.
0:04.6	Leap into the wild new world of artificial intelligence this summer at the all-new All-Ages exhibition, Adventures in AI.
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1:11.8	From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
1:16.2	Recent ice raids, especially in Los Angeles and Ventura counties this month,
1:20.8	have led to the arrests of hundreds of people, upended lives, and sparked protests,
1:27.1	and resulted in one known death, Jaime Alani-Scarcia, who fell during a chaotic raid in Camarillo.
1:33.7	Now federal immigration enforcement efforts are getting a major cash infusion after passage of the budget bill.
1:40.7	Journalist and historian of law enforcement Garrett Graff joins us to walk us through how that money will likely be used and why it affects us all, immigrant or not, undocumented or not. Join us.
1:47.0	Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. The budget for ICE, immigration, and customs enforcement has been $10 billion.
2:03.4	Now with the passage of President Trump's megabill, it's getting $30 billion to hire up, arrest and deport more people, and $45 billion to detain them.
2:13.3	Add to that customs and border protection is getting some $46 billion.
	...

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