What’s in the 2025 House Reconciliation Bill?

While the recommendations largely provide increases to immigration- and border enforcement-related funding provisions—roughly $151.3 billion—they also implicitly drive dramatic changes to immigration policy.

Legal immigration. The Judiciary bill risks turning legal immigration into a pay-to-play system, by significantly increasing fees on everything from asylum applications and work permits to family reunification and humanitarian protections like Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These fees, many of which would be layered on top of existing fees, could effectively put legal pathways out of reach for thousands of people. Take, for example, the new proposed fees for an asylum applicant who will need to wait at least 5 years to obtain a decision in the heavily backlogged immigration system: $1,000 (new application fee), $550 every six months for work authorization, and $100 every year for a pending application would result in at least $6,450 in filing fees during the 5-year wait. The new fees propose placing the burden of the backlogged immigration system on the applicants themselves. The steep fees would effectively block access to those unable to afford the new fees given that this cost alone represents nearly 43 percent of a person’s annual income who earns federal minimum wage working 40 hours per week.

Detention. The Judiciary bill provides $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities. This amount is 13 times ICE’s FY 2024 detention budget and would be a 364 percent increase on an annual basis that would primarily benefit private companies contracted to build and run detention facilities. With this funding, ICE could likely fund an increase in detention to 125,000 beds or higher, only just a bit below the current population of the entire federal prison system. The bill uses funding provisions to dismantle core legal protections for children by implicitly overriding protections found in the Flores litigation settlement agreement that limit the time minors can be detained.

The bill also authorizes the DHS Secretary to set minimal detention standards for detention facilities without having to go through normal review, creating a situation where private prison operators whose facilities fail to meet current standards could be granted contracts anyway. The consequences of providing such large sums of money to increase detention without commensurate oversight will exacerbate deleterious and inhumane conditions that have been endemic to the detention system for years, including medical neglect, overcrowding, overuse of solitary confinement, and preventable deaths.

Arrests. The Judiciary bill also directs $27 billion toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations and includes funding to hire an additional 10,000 ICE officers in five years. With this funding, the current administration will be poised to dramatically expand community arrests and expand cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies. Given the recent dismantling of three primary DHS oversight agencies, this funding would also rapidly expand ICE’s enforcement capacity at a time when the agency has failed to provide timely, accurate information on the whereabouts of those it has arrested.

Immigration Court. The Judiciary bill provides just $1.25 billion, a 30 percent annual budget increase, for the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the country’s immigration court system. By providing only small additional sums to the immigration courts while significantly expanding the arrest and detention budget, the significant immigration court backlogs will increase dramatically particularly for people held in detention facilities. Immigrants held in detention could be forced to wait months between every hearing, while those going through court outside of detention would face even longer backlogs than today up to several years per case.

Children. The Judiciary bill charges families of unaccompanied children up to $8,500 to sponsor a child and subjects them and their household members to intensive surveillance. It removes existing statutory protections regarding licensing of family residential centers, which places children at risk of prolonged detention in unsafe conditions. And by requiring children to pay $1,000 to apply for asylum or $500 to apply for Special Immigrant Juvenile status, the bill may even place some children in a precarious situation just to pay for their chance at permanent safety.

Border. The Homeland Security bill invests $51.6 billion into border wall construction—more than 3 times what the Trump administration spent on the wall in his first term despite the failure of the wall to improve or contribute in any meaningful way to border management strategy. The Armed Services bill also includes $5 billion for the Department of Defense to support the military’s border operations, including deployment of military personnel for immigration enforcement, temporary detention of migrants, and deportations of migrants.

Judicial Oversight. The Judiciary bill includes provisions to limit the judiciary branch’s oversight over the federal government by limiting the ability of judges to hold the executive branch in contempt of court when it fails to obey court orders.

House Homeland Security Committee Recommendations

• Total immigration and border-related spending: $66.6 billion, available through 9/30/29
• Bill’s overall total spending: $69.0 billion.

Selected immigration-related spending proposals include:

• $51.6 billion to construct and maintain a border wall
• $8.3 billion for CBP agent recruitment, retention and salaries, vehicles, and facility improvements
• $6.3 billion for border inspection technology and vetting
• Total immigration and border-related -related spending: $79.7 billion, available through 9/30/29
• Overall total spending: $81.4 billion.

House Judiciary Committee Recommendations

Selected immigration-related spending proposals include:

• $45 billion for ICE detention capacity growth for adult and family detention centers.
• $14.4 billion for ICE’s Transportation and Removal Operations
• $8 billion for hiring new ICE personnel, with a goal of hiring 10,000 new personnel by 2029, plus an additional $600 million for internal HR capacity.
• $3 billion for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to operate shelters for unaccompanied children.
• $1.32 billion for ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (immigration prosecutors)
• $1.25 billion for the immigration court system (EOIR).
• $950 million for compensating local governments for incarceration of “criminal aliens”
• $858 million for ICE retention and signing bonuses
• $650 million for 287(g) agreements
• $600 million for prosecuting immigration offenses
• $500 million for Remain in Mexico (“return of aliens arriving from contiguous territories”)
• $100 million for deporting unaccompanied children
• $100 million for expedited removal of certain people with criminal records
• Total immigration and border-related -related spending: $5 billion, available through 9/30/29
• Overall total spending: $150.3 billion.

Armed Services Committee Recommendations

Selected immigration-related spending proposals include:

• $5 billion to DOD to support border operations, including deployment of military personnel, the operation of and construction in national defense areas, the temporary detention of migrants, and the repatriation of migrants.

The Judiciary Committees’ recommendations dramatically increase or create new fees for certain immigration applications and forms of humanitarian protection. Below are five charts with a comparison of current and proposed fees that span USCIS, DOS, CBP, EOIR, and DHHS.

Importantly: all proposed fees are the minimum required but could be increased by the agency or department and may be layered on top of existing fees. And all fees are subject to yearly inflationary adjustments. Alarmingly, the proceeds of these fees largely go to the general fund at the Treasury Department and not for application processing.

The recommendations also prohibit waivers for most of these fees, which are typically used by particularly low-income people who would qualify for the legal relief they are seeking but cannot afford to apply. This overrides or erases other provisions of law, including in the Violence Against Women Act, which require the government to offer fee waivers to certain vulnerable populations.