The Escalation of Hate

Trump's new legislation funds mass deportation—and his loathsome desires—to a staggering degree. We should not be suprised.

This was all part of the Project 2025 plan. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Years before Donald Trump pushed his monstrous new bill through the Republican-controlled Congress, he’d been tirelessly demonizing migrants and other people he hates—building support and justification for his vile mass deportation program.

You likely remember the degrading onslaught during his years-long campaign: The Hitlerian talk that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the description of refugees seeking a better life as “vermin” who “infest” America, the lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs. It was clear where this would lead if this malignant man got back into our White House.

Here’s what I predicted in May last year:

The repetitive frequency of Trump’s repellant rhetoric should not be dismissed as not serious, no reason to worry or merely vile but insignificant insults by a shameful bigot. Rather, this should be understood as part of his continuing effort to degrade and dehumanize people, to normalize this sick verbiage and message, and prepare the public for the changes he hungers to make.

Keep in mind the Project 2025 intention to round up millions of immigrants with the aid of the military, put them in camps and deport them without due process. You can be sure there will be plenty more cruel and dehumanizing language to strengthen the public’s acquiescence to his campaign of vengeance and retribution.

And it’s important to remember this heinous agenda was not limited to migrants, but also included an anti-American plot that he declared on Veterans’ Day in 2023. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said in a speech that November. He added that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

A month before the new bill’s passage, House Speaker Mike Johnson paraded an Associated Press reporter into the Capitol’s Congressional prayer room to showcase his righteous mission. “Been here a lot this week, right there on my knees,” Johnson said. “Just praying...That’s what the founders did.” George Washington could be seen kneeling in a stained-glass image above Johnson.

Johnson told the reporter that he seeks divine guidance “in times of great challenge,” just like they did. “Because I’m convinced that God’s given us a chance to save this great republic,” he said.

It’s hard to overstate the pain and suffering that this bill will cause: Stripping away health coverage for more than 15 million Americans and cutting food assistance for more than 40 million Americans as it provides the largest transfer of wealth in our history from poor and working people to the richest among us. It takes an extreme hypocrite to insist this plan is God’s work.

“This is the United States of America—the wealthiest country in the history of the world. It is indecent to rip food out of the mouths of children and everyday Americans,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said during his eight-hour-plus floor speech before the Republicans passed their heartless bill.

But as much damage as this bill will cause for Americans dependent on Medicaid and food assistance, the most visible display of this regime’s sinister purposes will be seen in its massive expansion of funding for the rounding up, detention and deportation of immigrants. The scale of it is hard to grasp—and painful (but necessary) to consider what it means for our once-welcoming nation.

It’s important to be prepared for what’s coming, a grotesque and staggering escalation of Trump’s mass deportation plan that has already included masked men grabbing people off the streets and taking them away in unmarked cars without due process. This bill provides more than $150 billion for immigration and border-related operations.

As the American Immigration Council (AIC) summarizes, this includes nearly $80 billion for internal immigration enforcement, including $45 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention and $14.4 billion for ICE transportation and removal operations. This is on top of nearly $67 billion the House has designated for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

This is the “single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States,” notes AIC Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. ICE, he added in a report in May, “will now be flushed with more cash than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined.”

This AIC report explains that the funding allocated through September 30, 2029, would provide a 500 percent annual increase from ICE’s current annual budget for transportation and removal operations of $721 million. It also incudes a 365 percent increase on an annual basis for detention, from $3.4 billion now to $12.4, which is nearly 50 percent more than the budget of the entire federal prison system. This same budget includes only a 30 percent increase in funding for immigration courts, virtually ensuring that rounded-up people will be held in newly erected camps for longer periods of time, assuming that judicial proceedings will even be treated as an obligation by this lawless regime.

This massive funding and plan, Reichlin-Melnick concludes, “represents a fundamental reshaping of American society and due process for immigrants. ICE would become more powerful than every other federal law enforcement agency, allowing for a level of immigration enforcement that has no historical precedent.”

“We shouldn’t be kicking millions of people off Medicaid and denying lifesaving care to fund the Trump administration’s extreme deportation machine,” added Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer with the American Civil Liberties Union, noting later, “Instead of reining in ICE’s abuses, Congress is throwing the agency billions more to terrorize our communities.”

That abusive strategy was on full display last week. The quickly built concentration camp in Florida, tagged Alligator Alcatraz to amuse and benumb the public, is surely only the first among many now that ICE is flush with resources to pursue its hateful mission. This mass detention and deportation operation has never been simply about removing hardened criminals—a goal that has widespread support—but rather fulfilling Trump’s cruel and malignant desire to turn our country into a white nationalist haven. All Trump’s vile talk of vermin and poisoning of the blood made clear his intentions.

The America that we have known and loved—an inclusive country that recognized the value of diversity, welcomed people from all over the world and took pride in being a land of freedom—can only be rebuilt once this regime has been removed from power. That includes the exit of the despotic ringleader and sycophants like white Christian nationalist Mike Johnson. It will take all of us continuing to protect our neighbors, engage in mass protest and advocate for the millions of hard-working people and their families who came to America seeking a better life.

But let’s make no mistake: It will get worse, probably a lot worse given the scale of resources that sociopaths like “border czar” Tom Homan and Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem have been given by the feckless and cowed Congress in service to one man. They need to know that we the governed have not given them consent for their hateful actions.

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