That’s the double-barreled finding contained in a new Senate Budget Committee analysis and an independent review of federal spending data published by budget analyst Kevin McNellis — a combination that raises urgent questions about fiscal oversight at the very moment Republicans are moving to dramatically expand the enforcement apparatus.

According to the Senate Budget Committee, Office of Management and Budget data shows that as of the end of March, ICE had not obligated $63.2 billion of the $74.9 billion it received under last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. CBP had not obligated $40 billion of its $64.7 billion allocation. Combined: $103 billion in unobligated funds — and counting.

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The allegations: $40,000 in gifts, luxury trips to Italy and Aruba, and a Bottega handbag, all allegedly funded by a man she met on a site dedicated to “mutually beneficial” arrangements. That man has since been identified as a government contractor named Robert Bianchi, who filed a formal complaint with the DHS Office of the Inspector General.

Varvaro says this is an angry ex trying to destroy a career she built on a master’s degree and Ph.D. in homeland security. That may be. Breakups get ugly. Boyfriends buy gifts. But the OIG doesn’t typically put people on administrative leave over a bad breakup.

Overnight, reporter Jacqueline Sweet broke the identity of the alleged sugar daddy: Robert Bianchi.

The relationship has drawn intense scrutiny due to potential conflicts of interest and the official’s glamorous lifestyle, which was reportedly funded by Bianchi. Investigations into the matter highlight concerns over how their personal ties may have influenced government contracts or security clearances. This exposure is the latest development in a broader scandal involving the intersection of private wealth and public office at the DHS.

The Security Problem

The counterintelligence concern writes itself. When someone with access to the nation’s most sensitive counterterrorism data is under financial stress — or being bankrolled by an outside party — they become a recruitment target. It doesn’t matter whether the leverage comes from a disgruntled ex or a foreign intelligence service. The vulnerability is the same.

Going into White House Correspondents’ weekend, this is the story that won’t leave the conversation. I caught up with several members of Congress on the House steps Thursday to get their read on it.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., is calling for a full investigation into a DHS counter-terrorism official, arguing that the sensitivity of the role leaves no room for personal compromises. He warns that such vulnerabilities could create conflicts of interest or be exploited by foreign adversaries, potentially undermining national security.

Rep. Alexander Vindman, D-Va., didn’t mince words. He called the situation “obviously outrageous” and questioned how someone with these vulnerabilities ends up in a critically important counterterrorism role while the U.S. is, in his words, effectively at war with Iran. Whether the influence comes from an angry ex or a foreign power, he said, it demands a full investigation.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., zeroed in on the “how” — how does a low-level FEMA staffer get fast-tracked into a top counterterrorism post? He characterized the broader administration as a “cesspool of political and financial corruption” where public policy is seemingly available to the highest bidder.

Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., a member of the Homeland Security Committee, was the most direct. She called for Varvaro’s immediate termination, framing this not as a personal relationship gone sideways but as a potential pay-to-play arrangement — government access and contracts traded for rent and luxury goods.

This story is still unfolding. The OIG complaint is in. Varvaro is on leave. Sweet had the latest scoop. And I made a YouTube video:

Give it a watch and be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven’t already!

The conversations are happening as the Senate kicked off a late-night “vote-a-rama” Wednesday, pushing through a budget resolution that would pre-fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection for three and a half years — at a price tag of roughly $70 billion — using the budget reconciliation process to bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold that would otherwise require Democratic support.

The House Republican, who was granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations, did not dispute the characterization of the farm bill discussions.

“Absolutely,” the lawmaker said, noting they didn’t want to get out in front of Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-PA). “We’re leaving no stone unturned when it comes to getting the brave men and women of ICE the resources that they need.”

The two House Democratic aides, also speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations publicly, confirmed that the possibility of attaching ICE funding to H.R. 7567 — the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, which cleared the House Agriculture Committee 34-17 in March — has circulated among Republican members working on the legislation.

The farm bill is already one of the most politically volatile pieces of legislation moving through Congress. It has drawn fierce opposition from anti-hunger advocates over its decision to lock in $187 billion in SNAP cuts enacted through last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — the same reconciliation vehicle Republicans used to effectively triple the budgets of ICE and Border Patrol, securing more than $170 billion in supplemental enforcement funding through 2029.

Now, Republicans appear intent on threading ICE funding into agricultural legislation that has historically depended on an urban-rural coalition — a move that would force Democrats to choose between opposing a bill that funds rural broadband, farm credit, and conservation programs, or voting for an expansion of immigration enforcement.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., a senior member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, offered a window into the legislative calculus in an interview with Migrant Insider Tuesday on the Capitol. Discussing the ICE reconciliation measure, Hoeven said he had been pushing to attach agricultural provisions to the enforcement funding package — suggesting that the Ag-ICE nexus runs in both legislative directions.

“I’ve got something on Ag I want to get in there to help farmers and ranchers and so forth,” Hoeven said. “We’re either going to have to do that in the supplemental, which could come next, or if we are able to do another reconciliation bill in the fall.”

When asked whether the reconciliation bill was the last vehicle for this kind of enforcement funding, Hoeven was candid about the pressure driving Republican strategy.

“We’re making sure that Democrats cannot defund law enforcement and cannot go back and open borders for the next three and a half years,” he said.

Hoeven also offered the clearest explanation to date of how Republicans are accounting for the mounting layers of ICE funding. The One Big Beautiful Bill, he said, had been funding all of DHS — a $120 billion enterprise — not just ICE and CBP. The new reconciliation measure would carve out a dedicated ICE and CBP funding stream, freeing up the earlier money for its originally intended purposes, including border wall construction. Listen to my interview with Hoeven here:

“Once we get this done — through reconciliation we fund ICE and CBP — then the OB3 money can go for the other intended purposes: building a wall, all those kind of things,” Hoeven said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the overnight session a “reconciliation of reckoning,” with Democrats introducing a barrage of amendments on affordability and cost-of-living — unable to block the measure outright given the Republican 53-seat majority, but determined to put GOP members on the record.

For migrant communities already navigating the most expansive ICE enforcement infrastructure in modern American history, the question is no longer whether more money is coming — but how many hundreds of billions of Republicans will front-load into the booming police state apparatus while they still control all three branches of government.

This is why Migrant Insider exists — and why it can’t be a one-man shop forever. Paid subscribers are how we stay ahead of the outlets just now discovering this beat. Join the community that keeps this reporting alive, and tell one person who needs to read this.

Salazar, the Miami Republican who represents one of the most immigrant-dense congressional districts in the country, has spent years marketing herself as the reasonable face of immigration reform — a daughter of Cuban exiles who understands the stakes. Her vehicle is the Dignity Act, a bill she has promoted with the fervor of a televangelist and the conviction of someone who voted, in the same breath, to make its core promise illegal.

The Dignity Act Of 2025

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That’s not a typo.

In May 2023, Salazar voted for the Secure the Border Act, a piece of legislation that would have gutted the very parole authority that kept hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans — her constituents — lawfully in the United States. The bill passed 219-213.

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1. The Work Permit That May Never Come

DHS has proposed a rule — buried in 91 FR 8616 — that would make asylum seekers wait a full year before they can even apply for a work permit. Then another six months for processing. And if USCIS falls behind — which it already has, for years — the agency can simply stop accepting applications altogether. No work. No timeline. No end in sight. Nursing homes, hospitals, and care workers are already sounding alarms. The families waiting for permission to earn a living are not yet on anyone’s front page.

2. A Nationwide Freeze Nobody’s Talking About

Two USCIS policy memos — PM-602-0192 and PM-602-0194 — quietly put a hold on every pending asylum application in the country. Every single one. Then froze immigration benefits for nationals from more than 35 “high-risk” countries, including students on OPT and STEM OPT, people mid-change-of-status, workers with cases in queue. The alarm is being sounded by university international offices and immigration attorneys. The national press has largely moved on.

3. An Emergency Power Invoked for the First Time in 30 Years — and Extended Again

Congress created the “Finding of Mass Influx of Aliens” authority in 1996. Nobody used it for nearly three decades. Then January 2025 happened. DHS has now extended the declaration multiple times — most recently through a Federal Register notice published March 26, 2026 — giving the Secretary broad power to deputize state and local cops as de facto immigration officers. The legal architecture for a permanent, decentralized enforcement regime is being built quietly. The civil rights implications have barely been explored.

4. A Government App That Pays You to Leave

The CBP Home app now offers a $1,000 exit bonus, free travel, and forgiveness of civil fines — which can run nearly $1,000 per day — if you agree to self-deport. DHS calls it humane and efficient. What the coverage has not asked: how voluntary is “voluntary” when the alternative is indefinite detention or financial ruin? And what happens to the people who take the deal and can never come back?

5. 1,400 Yemenis Lose Their Status on May 4

DHS says Yemen no longer qualifies for Temporary Protected Status. The UN, humanitarian organizations, and the people actually living through the conflict there might beg to differ. Roughly 1,400 Yemeni TPS holders — concentrated in Dearborn, Brooklyn, and California’s Central Valley — will lose their protection and work authorization in two weeks. Their story has not been told at scale.

6. The Numbers Don’t Lie — And Nobody’s Reading Them

The Deportation Data Project out of UCLA and UC Berkeley has the receipts: deportations up fivefold. Street arrests up elevenfold. Arrests of people with no criminal record up more than eightfold. Interior detention beds quadrupled — from 14,000 to 57,000. The data exists. The national frame does not. Yet.

This is why Migrant Insider exists — and why it can’t be a one-man shop forever. Paid subscribers are how we stay ahead of the outlets just now discovering this beat. Join the community that keeps this reporting alive, and tell one person who needs to read this.

In 2017, Criselda Vasquez, a Chicana painter working out of California, reimagined Grant Wood’s American Gothic — the one on the refrigerator magnets, the one every American schoolchild knows — and put her parents in it. Her mother and father, both immigrants from Mexico, standing together, holding cleaning supplies and a hoe, a red truck behind them. Not in front of a Midwestern farmhouse. In front of their life.

She called it The New American Gothic.

The Lucas Museum for Narrative Art in Los Angeles bought it in 2021. It hangs there now, or in storage, or somewhere in the permanent collection of American cultural memory. Her parents are in it. They are dignified. They are permanent.

Her father is not permanent. On the morning of Tuesday, March 31, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents st…

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It was 1944. The U.S. government had rounded up more than 110,000 Japanese Americans — citizens and noncitizens alike — and warehoused them in desert camps under the authority of an executive order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Matsui was born into that detention. She did not choose it. No one did.

It is the kind of origin story that, in a district built on refugee families and immigrant communities, carries enormous moral weight. It is the kind of story a campaign puts front and center. It is also the kind of story that makes what follows very hard to explain.

‘Hell No’ — and the Record That Follows It

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You may have noticed Migrant Insider got a fresh coat of paint.

The redesign was done by Roque Strew, a Houston-based designer who understood the assignment from the jump: this isn’t a newsletter. It’s a newsroom. The look needed to match the mission.

Bold. Uncluttered. Built to last.

The maroon, the orange, the gray — same colors you know, but now they hit the way they were always supposed to. The wordmark is sharper. The profile icon is cleaner.

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What he found last week should have stopped the United States Senate cold.

So far, it has not.

McNellis pulled the numbers on how ICE and the Border Patrol spent the $139.7 billion Congress handed them last year through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That was not a typo. One hundred and thirty-nine point seven billion dollars. More than four times what those two agencies had ever seen in a single budget year in their combined history.

How much of it did they actually spend?

Eleven percent.

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Home Depot Notice of 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders

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The question goes to a vote on May 21.

Item 8 on the agenda for Home Depot’s 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders — virtual only, 9 a.m. Eastern — is a shareholder proposal filed by Neil Fisher and Meryl Loonin. They are asking the company’s Board of Directors to produce a report assessing the risks to customers’ data privacy rights that result from Home Depot sharing sensitive data with third parties. The data in question includes gender, race, ethnicity, and geolocation.

The vehicle is Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Reader cameras — ALPRs, in the business — deployed across Home Depot location…

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The vote came one day after the House cleared a 219-209 procedural hurdle on the motion to discharge, setting up Thursday’s definitive action on Discharge Petition No. 15, which Pressley, D-Mass., filed back on January 22.

Final passage of H.R. 1689 — the underlying bill, sponsored by Reps. Laura Gillen, D-N.Y., and Mike Lawler, R-N.Y. — was expected Thursday afternoon.

At stake: work authorization and deportation protection for roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the United States, people the State Department’s own travel advisories say cannot safely return to a country currently classified as “Do Not Travel.”

“The statutory deadline has already passed,” Pressley said from the House floor Wednesday, invoking the story of Rebeca, a Haitian TPS holder and certified nursing assistant in her Massachusetts district. “We cannot wait.”

Every House Democrat signed the petition. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to join them — Salazar of Florida, Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Lawler of New York, and Bacon of Nebraska — with additional GOP members voting yes on the floor despite never having formally signed. Florida’s Haitian-American constituency, centered in South Florida districts represented by Salazar and Rep. Carlos Gimenez, applied sustained pressure that proved impossible to ignore.

Discharge petitions almost never work. They require 218 signatures — a majority of the full House — and party leadership in both chambers typically treats them as threats to institutional order. On immigration, they have historically died well short of threshold. This one didn’t.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., supplied the 218th signature on March 27, triggering a seven-legislative-day clock that put Thursday’s votes in motion.

The vote arrived as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral argument in Trump v. Miot, consolidated challenges to the Trump administration’s attempted termination of Haiti’s TPS designation. Nearly 200 Democratic members filed an amicus brief urging the Court to affirm lower-court injunctions that have kept TPS alive while litigation proceeds.

Disgraced DHS Secretary Kristi Noem argued that Haiti’s conditions no longer warrant the protection and has pushed to wind down the program. Federal courts, finding serious Administrative Procedure Act and equal protection problems, have repeatedly blocked her.

Whether the Senate takes up H.R. 1689 remains the central unknown. Senate Republican leadership has shown no appetite for immigration bills that constrain the administration. But the House’s action today gives TPS advocates a legislative record, a floor vote, and a number — 220 — to take into that fight.

Pressley, co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, has noted that about 20 percent of Haitian nationals in the United States work in health care. Pull them out of the workforce, her argument goes, and you don’t just separate families — you destabilize the caregiving infrastructure of American communities coast to coast.

That argument, apparently, was enough for 220 members. As for Pressley, as you can see from the interview I did with her immediately after the vote (above), she sees this victory as a potential blueprint in the fight for migrant rights.

On Thursday in Minnesota, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced felony assault charges against Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent from Temple Hills, Maryland — making him the first federal law enforcement officer to face criminal charges stemming from Operation Metro Surge, the winter immigration sweep that occupied the Twin Cities, killed two U.S. citizens, and left a community still counting its wounds.

Morgan faces two counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon. There is now a warrant for his arrest. He is not in custody.

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1. ICE Is Kicking Down Doors Without Judge-Signed Warrants

Civil rights groups have filed federal lawsuits in Boston and Washington, D.C., challenging a secret DHS policy that authorizes ICE agents to force entry into homes using an internal Form I-205 “warrant of removal” — a piece of paper no federal judge has ever signed. A whistleblower-revealed May 2025 memo reversed longstanding DHS guidance to greenlight the practice. The Brennan Center calls it what it is: a deliberate attempt to carve out an immigration exception to the Fourth Amendment. U.S. citizens have had their doors breached. The lawsuits include their names.

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The plan, being driven by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., would use the budget reconciliation process — a parliamentary shortcut that requires only a simple Senate majority — to fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. President Trump has publicly blessed the effort and demanded a bill on his desk by June 1.

There’s just one inconvenient fact standing in the way of the GOP’s emergency: ICE is already prefunded through 2029.

Graham has floated the idea of locking in enforcement funding for up to a decade. A decade. For an agency whose funding runway already extends to the end of this presidential term and beyo…

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“Letters From Leo” is Hale’s timely Substack about the first American Pope—a defiant, introverted Midwestern priest who seeks to understand the world but stands on principle against the signature policies of the Trump White House.

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Mass deportations. Genocide in Gaza. Israeli-American attacks on Iran. Leo opposes all three, and more. Hale expects Leo’s upcoming encyclical on artificial intelligence to be a global banger, echoing the impact of Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. “The ability to impact the Catholic worldview in the U.S. is his superpower,” Hale told me during our interviews.

An upcoming papal encyclical on AI could be the next flashpoint between the Vatican and Trump. As the technology reshapes our humanity, Leo is drawing a line in the sand that the none can ignore.

Watch the full interview on YouTube here:

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According to the Washington Post, Pirro discovered in August that a subordinate in her office had been quietly blocking U visa certifications — essentially stopping the clock on applications from immigrant crime victims who had done everything the system asked of them. She ordered the employee to restart processing immediately. When he refused, she demoted him, replacing him with a veteran victims’ services prosecutor who made clearing the backlog a priority.

Spokesman Tim Lauer put her position on the record without hedging. Pirro, he said, “champions the U visas and believes they’re essential.” He added that she views the issue as being “about victim protection and creating an orderly society where victims are protected [regardless] of their legal status.” That’s the kind of language you’d expect from a legal aid attorney, not someone who built a TV career out of hard-nosed law-and-order rhetoric.

The stakes are real. U visas exist precisely because Congress decided, back in 2000, that public safety depends on immigrant communities trusting law enforcement enough to report crimes. When those certifications stop — whether because of a rogue staffer or a hostile political climate — domestic violence survivors stay silent, trafficking victims stay hidden, and cases go unsolved. The Pirro episode is a reminder that even within this administration, the architecture of immigrant protections occasionally finds an unexpected defender.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is why Migrant Insider exists — and why it can’t be a one-man shop forever. Paid subscribers are how we stay ahead of the outlets just now discovering this beat. Join the community that keeps this reporting alive, and tell one person who needs to read this.

Ansari Doesn’t Need An Invitation

Yesterday, Congresswoman Yasmine Ansari from Arizona turned up unannounced to an ICE detention center in her district. In accordance with federal law and multiple court orders, Ansari was allowed in by agents. This is what she saw in her own words:

The H-1B Fee Loophole

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The Montreal-based private security conglomerate — through its U.S. arm, GardaWorld Federal Services LLC — has quietly muscled its way into one of the most lucrative and consequential federal contracting arenas in a generation: the mass detention and processing of migrants inside the United States.

In March 2026, the Department of Homeland Security awarded GardaWorld a contract to convert a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona — an industrial building never designed for human habitation — into an ICE processing and detention center capable of holding roughly 1,500 people. The initial one-year award: approximately $313.4 million. With options extending through February 2029, the potential total value reaches an estimated $704 million.

That is not a typo. A company whose primary federal resume in…

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You’re a Founding Member of Migrant Insider, which means you bet on this outlet when it was barely an outline. That deserves more than a thank-you line at the bottom of a newsletter.

Starting now, I’m opening up one-on-one meetings — and small groups of up to three — at Tune Inn on Capitol Hill. If you’ve got questions about where Migrant Insider is headed, want to talk Trump, or Congress, or immigration policy, or just want to put a face to the byline, reply to this email and we’ll find a time.

A few ground rules: groups max out at three of you plus me — that’s what the booth fits. As a courtesy, everything is off-the-record unless you tell me otherwise. I’ll buy the first round.

This isn’t a quarterly event. It’s just an open door.

Reply here to set something up.

—Pablo

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They were pumping gas. Walking to the train. Driving a daughter to school. Crossing a parking lot on the way to work.

That was enough.

Federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have been stopping and arresting Latino New Yorkers in encounters that four civil rights organizations now say are flatly illegal — suspicionless, warrantless, and driven not by evidence of wrongdoing, but by race.

On Thursday, The Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, and Covington & Burling LLP filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, charging DHS with running a systematic racial profiling operation across New York City and the surrounding region that has put immigrant communities — and the Constitution — under siege.

“ICE is profiling and arresting Black and Brown New Yorkers based solely on their appearance,” said Meghna Philip, Director of the Special Litigation Unit at The Legal Aid Society. “This lawlessness must come to an end, and the federal government must be held accountable for its abuse of authority.”

The complaint names eight Latino plaintiffs from Long Island, Brooklyn, and Buffalo — men and women ranging in age from 19 to 63 — alongside the Workers’ Center of Central New York, a Syracuse-based labor organizing group whose membership has been directly terrorized by the enforcement surge.

The numbers tell the story.

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Her name, according to the Bangladeshi press outlets that bothered to cover her murder, was Nilufar Easmin.

She had come to this country from Gorarbag village, in the Kushakhali Union of Lakshmipur District, in southeastern Bangladesh — a place most Americans couldn’t find on a map even if the fate of the republic depended on it. She had two daughters. She had been working the register at the D&D Convenience Store, a Bangladeshi-owned shop bolted to a Chevron station on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly three months.

On the morning of April 2, she heard her car being vandalized in the parking lot. She walked outside to find out why.

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