Weekend Edition: ICE Funding Is The New Border Wall

This week, Congress quietly advanced a staggering twelve-figure funding framework for mass deportations.

Good morning! This week, we filed thirteen news stories here on Substack—eight of which are listed below as a recap of last week’s immigration news. Let us know on social media what we missed in yet another aggressive week of headlines from the Trump administration’s firehose.

Predictably, immigration is the defining story of Trump’s second term. Migrant Insider has been less predictable. As a pioneering Beltway newsroom, we’ve grown steadily into the hellish, demoralizing beat we now claim as our own—firmly rooted in Washington, with eyes beyond.

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With Congress in recess next week, we’ll have more bandwidth to dig deeper into ICE under Trump—the coverage that consistently drives our subscriber growth, paid and otherwise. But ICE raids, dramatic as they are, aren’t the most important immigration stories of 2025. Instead, that would be ICE’s funding.

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Follow the Money: ICE Funding in Congress

Mass deportations have been wildly expensive in Trump’s first quarter back in the White House. Tom Homan has been on the Hill, hat in hand, asking congressional Republicans for money to secure a border where illegal crossings have largely stopped. What he’s asking for isn’t just cash—it’s infrastructure: the scaffolding of a deportation-industrial complex. Homan says he needs more “beds” in detention centers.

What he really means by “beds” is more private prisons—facilities operated by companies with an abysmal track record of overpromising and underdelivering on their federal migrant detention contracts.