Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
07.12.2025
The new law aims to shift much of the nation’s law enforcement toward immigration — and could reduce efforts to prevent violent crime.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wait in Federal Plaza Immigration Court in New York City to detain noncitizens after their status hearings, regardless of the judges’ ruling, in June 2025.
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters.
President Donald Trump signed a sprawling budget bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — into law last week. The legislation, a vehicle for most of his domestic policy agenda, rewrites significant portions of the country’s immigration and criminal justice systems in ways big and small.
The most visible shift is the law’s commitment of about $170 billion to immigration enforcement over the next decade. That includes a 265% annual increase to the national immigration detention budget, according to the American Immigration Council, an immigration advocacy group. The administration plans to rapidly double immigration detention space to hold about 100,000 people, largely by paying private prison companies to reopen currently shuttered facilities.
A less publicized provision of the law offloads some of the costs of immigration enforcement directly onto immigrants. The law includes new or increased fees for Temporary Protected Status, asylum claims, work permits, appeals and visas, and new fines for deportations and apprehensions. The Wall Street Journal estimates the fees will raise well over $1 billion in revenue over the next decade.
That cost burden will likely deter some eligible people from seeking legal protections in the U.S. “Some people may not be able to get temporary protective status and take advantage of some of these provisions because people can’t afford it, or because people are nervous they can’t afford it,” said Lauren Brook-Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning non-partisan think tank.
Another way the law changes immigration enforcement is by setting aside about $15 billion in grants to state and local governments for immigration enforcement. In theory, all these funds from the law are to be disbursed over 5–10 years. But David J. Bier, a policy scholar with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, wrote that a lot of the spending is likely to be front-loaded. “It is even plausible that they could blow through this money by next year and demand more from Congress,” Bier concluded.
For a sense of scale, $15 billion is about three times the roughly $5 billion that the federal government provides in grants to state and local police in a typical year, according to a Marshall Project review of federal spending documents.
At the same time, the law authorizes the attorney general to withhold certain grants from jurisdictions that limit information-sharing with federal immigration authorities, a provision that is likely to be wielded against sanctuary cities. Because compliance is defined “as determined by the Attorney General,” the law creates a broad and variable standard that allows for political appointees to decide unilaterally which jurisdictions are in violation.
Among the most affected programs is Byrne-JAG funding, which trickles down to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country, aiming to help reduce crime.
Using these funds as an incentive to get communities to adopt or abandon certain policies is not a new concept. The first Trump administration tried to make these grants conditional on cooperation with immigration enforcement, but the courts rebuffed that effort. During the 2020 election, Joe Biden explicitly suggested taking Byrne-JAG funding away from police departments that continued to execute no-knock warrants, as part of his police reform platform. But now, the limitations Trump wants are enshrined in federal law, making them harder to challenge in court.
The new law also rewrites what Byrne-JAG funding can be used for, making community violence prevention programs ineligible. While the funds were always primarily used to pay for enforcement efforts, in recent years, there has been a push for jurisdictions to use the money for prevention efforts like community violence interrupter programs that aim to stop shootings before they happen by mediating conflicts.
“There’s so much evidence out there that this is an effective way to reduce crime,” said Mike McLively, the policy director at the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention. “For a Republican Party that says they’re about local discretion, local control and choice, this just takes a tool off the table, which to me, is very frustrating.”
Police officers, meanwhile, stand to benefit substantially from the new law, reports The Intercept, mainly due to a provision that cuts federal taxes on overtime pay. Officers frequently work overtime, and in many departments, those shifts have become more common as cities struggle to find new recruits.
Beyond the criminal justice impacts spelled out in the legislation, there are also a number of potential indirect effects. Writing for the Vera Institute, Erica Bryant noted late last month that formerly incarcerated people have a harder time getting jobs than the general public. As a result, the new Medicaid work requirements in the bill could disproportionately strip healthcare access from people reentering society.
Bryant also argues that the broader cuts to social safety net programs, like food stamps, are likely to increase crime. “These cuts will cause massive destabilization, especially in communities experiencing poverty, making people less safe,” Bryant argued.
