Archive July 20, 2025

A passenger ship, the KM Barcelona VA, in Indonesia, is engulfed by flames, as captured in a video. The burning ship has been evacuated by the national search and rescue organization in North Sulawesi Province near Talise Island.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which will lower taxes for the wealthy, punish the poor, and otherwise increase American plutocracy, was signed into law on July 4 by President Trump.

In response to Trump’s vice president JD Vance’s statement, “Everything else is irrelevant in comparison to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” the president’s vice president said in a statement released just days earlier.

In fact, the bill allocates an unprecedented sum of $ 175 billion to anti-immigration efforts, roughly $ 30 billion of which will go directly to the notorious US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in its original form. The American Immigration Council notes that the construction of new immigration detention centers “represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget.” This amount represents an additional $45 billion earmarked for the construction of new immigration detention centers.

With more money available each year than the military of any other country in the world, aside from the US and China, ICE now occupies the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history.

One could be forgiven for thinking that ICE agents have recently established themselves as being known for running around in masks and kidnapping people for nothing, but they have made a name for themselves.

Naturally, the stodgier increase in ICE funding comes as no surprise given that the president has not yet begun to consider how a US economy that is largely dependent on undocumented laborers will continue to exist in the absence of said laborers. His obsession with the idea of deporting millions of people has not spurred him to think about how, precisely, a US economy will continue to function.

The agreement, which includes detention companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which are contracted by ICE, will pay large sums of money to the detention-industrial complex. According to a July 4 Washington Post article about ICE’s upcoming “detention blitz,” each company reportedly donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration in January.

The Post article also provided additional proof of how “democracy” in the US actually operates: “Geo Group executives have primed shareholders for a government contract bonanza that could increase annual revenues by more than 40% and profits by more than 60%.”

However, the government must invent other stories, such as that ICE is preventing the US from “vicious criminal illegal aliens” because it is unable to come out and say this is all about money. Never mind that the agency has a large majority of people with no criminal records.

A six-year-old boy with leukaemia who was detained in late May at the Los Angeles immigration courthouse with his family for a scheduled asylum hearing is one of ICE’s ever-growing list of victims. During the upheaval, a Mexican farmworker named Jaime Alanis, 57, fell from a greenhouse roof during the massive ICE raids on two California farms, resulting in more than 360 arrests and the death of him.

It’s not all of ICE’s detainees are undocumented, either, because it’s difficult to tell when you’re frantically trying to meet detention quotas and when you’re completely aware that you’re above the law. One of the detainees from the farm raids was US Army veteran George Retes, 25, who was pepper-sprayed before being imprisoned for three days while missing his three-year-old daughter’s birthday celebration. Without any justification, he was freed.

Now, in Vance’s words, imagine the landscape with an additional $175 billion in “ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

As if ICE’s manic and arbitrary detention practices and the elimination of due process weren’t enough to cause concern, political repression and the criminalization of dissidents are also being used as a tool. This was evident in the recent spate of abductions of international scholars, including 30-year-old Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, who is a student there studying child development.

Because she had co-authored an article for the university newspaper the year before expressing her solidarity with Palestinians, she was surrounded by masked agents, forced into an unmarked vehicle, and disappeared to an ICE detention center in Louisiana while driving to an iftar dinner in March.

Ozturk recalls her 45-day detention in gruesome conditions that were only made more bearable by the solidarity of her fellow female detainees, who range from various countries, in a new essay for Vanity Fair. “An officer once came and took all the cookie boxes, claiming we would use them to make weapons,” says Ozturk. Another time, we were horrified to see a police officer slam two women against the wall.

The US Department of Homeland Security threw a tantrum over Tim Walz’s “dangerous rhetoric” when the governor of Minnesota recently had the gut to refer to ICE as “Trump’s modern Gestapo” and released a press release asserting that, “while politicians like governors like governors like governors like . ICE officers will continue risking their lives as they fight to deter criminal illegal aliens, including pedophiles and murderers.

This was, without a doubt, “dangerous rhetoric” coming from those who are abducting doctoral students, six-year-old leukaemia patients, army veterans, and other people.

The One Big Beautiful Bill’s super-funding of ICE has devastating effects on US society as a whole, but undocumented workers may be the most immediate and obvious victims. In the end, a rogue agency stealing people off the street while causing fear in entire communities does not imply a “land of the free,” especially when the president appears to think that anyone who disagrees with him might face criminal punishment.

Senior fellow at the American Immigration Council Aaron Reichlin-Melnick remarked that “you don’t build the police state first, then you build the mass deportation machine.” And if we take the phrase “a country in which the government uses the police to severely restrict people’s freedom” to a big beautiful T from the Cambridge dictionary, it seems like the US already fits the description.