Austin (USA),. – The new tax law approved this Tuesday by the United States Senate will inject billions of dollars into President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration project.
With this budget, which the Republican leader has called a “big and beautiful law”, the government’s largest spending on security agencies will be allocated, by a wide margin, to immigration: it will be eight times greater than the entire FBI budget and 13 times higher than that of the DEA.
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The vote in the Senate sent the bill back to the
House of Representatives, where it must be reviewed again and get approval to become law.
With an expenditure of almost
170 billion dollars in four years, the Government will increase the number of migration agents
-with about 20,000 new positions-, will build new detention centers for migrants and will invest in surveillance technologies, including artificial intelligence.
Specifically, the law provides for more than $64 billion for the construction of the border wall and another $70 billion for the detention of migrants, which includes the construction and maintenance of detention centers and the transportation of deportees.
To increase detentions and fill these centers, the Government plans to hire more than 20,000 new agents for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and for the Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The conservative think tank CATO already predicts that, once this law comes into effect, the number of people held in migrant detention centers will quadruple: it will increase from 50,000 currently to more than 200,000 throughout the country.
Increase in the costs of immigration and humanitarian procedures
The law will also increase the costs of some immigration procedures and, for the first time, a fee of $1,000 will be charged to apply for asylum, a status designed to protect people fleeing political, religious, social, or racial persecution in their countries of origin.
The cost to apply for a work permit will be
550 dollars and it will only be valid for six months. In addition, 100 dollars will be charged annually to those who have a pending asylum application.
Appealing a decision by an immigration judge will cost 900 dollars (previously 110) and the cost of applying for
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will also rise to 500 dollars.
Taxes on remittances and loss of tax benefits
The law creates a new tax that will directly affect the economy of migrants in the U.S., with a 3.5% tax on remittances sent abroad.
The United States is the main sender of remittances in the world, according to World Bank data, with more than $85.8 billion sent in 2023, according to the
Migration Policy Institute.
The law also includes measures that directly affect migrants, further restricting their already limited access to tax benefits.
Families in which one of the parents is undocumented or does not have a social security number will not be able to access the child tax credit program, which reduces the amount of taxes to be paid.
In turn, federal funds for the Medicaid program will be reduced for states that offer health services to migrants without legal status, and some migrants with legal status – including those with work visas or TPS – will be prohibited from accessing health insurance with reduced costs.
