Trump’s BBB: The Big Bill Changing Big Lives

The Senate passed its version of the reconciliation bill on Tuesday, July 1, 2025 and sent it back to the House of Representative which passed the updated version on July 3.

President Trump signed his so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law on July 4^th. This new law will slash funding for vital American programs. The law also marks a dramatic escalation in enforcement priorities and funding, with implications that will ripple across communities, courts, and borders. What’s in store regarding immigration now that it has passed?

• Making legal immigration a pay-to play system with astronomically high and largely mandatory fees. The bill will make it impossible for many low- to moderate-income people to apply for immigration benefits by imposing substantially higher fees on immigration applications, including humanitarian programs like asylum, parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Fee waivers are largely eliminated, even for vulnerable populations and the costs are indexed to inflation, meaning they will rise over time.
• Lining the pockets of private prison corporations by expanding the immigration detention system. The bill includes a 265% annual budget increase (to $45 billion) for ICE’s current detention budget. This would represent a nearly 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system and could result in daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.
• Supercharging arrests in our communities and in small businesses. ICE will receive $30 billion—three times its current annual budget—to hire new ICE agents and enlist local law enforcement agencies to enforce civil immigration law across the country.
• Expanding deportations, including to third countries and notorious foreign prisons. The billions of dollars in new funding will allow ICE to continue to ignore court orders and circumvent people’s due process rights as it aims to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

For text of the bill, click here.