HIAS strongly condemns Congress’s vote to provide more than $70 billion in additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), dramatically expanding an enforcement apparatus that has already inflicted profound harm on immigrant families and communities across the United States.
Over the past year, Americans have witnessed the brutal consequences of this administration’s immigration enforcement agenda. Families have been torn apart. Communities have been subjected to fear and intimidation. And immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees – many of them with lawful status in this country – have been swept into an increasingly aggressive detention and deportation system. At Delaney Hall in New Jersey, Adelanto in California, and in other facilities across the country, detained immigrants are even engaging in hunger strikes to protest abysmal conditions and to demand basic dignity.
“It is unfathomable that Congress is providing yet another blank check to ICE and CBP after witnessing the pain and suffering that these agencies are inflicting in their own communities,” said Naomi Steinberg, HIAS Vice President of U.S. Policy & Advocacy. “By doubling down with tens of billions in additional taxpayer dollars, Congress is ensuring more people who committed no crime are detained indefinitely in horrific conditions, more parents are deported without their children, and more communities are forced to live in fear.”
In addition to almost unlimited funding for detention, deportation, and surveillance, the bill includes $350 million in a slush fund for ICE to target cities that the administration deems are “uncooperative” with its immigration enforcement agenda.
“This will infuse billions more into a rotten immigration enforcement system, with no checks and no balances,” continued Steinberg. “HIAS will continue to fight against the fear and intimidation that ICE is inflicting, and to serve refugees and immigrants across the country in this trying moment. Our own Jewish history shows the consequence of silence in the face of injustice.”
For press inquiries, contact media@hias.org.