Tuesday’s PBS News Hour showed more strange respect to a limited-government organization, the libertarian Cato Institute, when their views were in sympathy with the anti-deportation crusade of PBS News.
After a brief on charges filed against 10 people in the attempted murder of federal agents at a Texas immigration detention center, co-anchor Amna Nawaz added, “The charges come as immigration agents just received a major infusion of funding to carry out President Trump's deportation agenda. The big budget bill passed by Republicans includes billions for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, giving it more funding than any other federal law enforcement agency…."
White House correspondent Laura Barron–Lopez broke down the “more than $160 billion that are going to immigration enforcement and the deportation operation.”
Amna Nawaz: So that increase in funding for ICE, for immigration enforcement, how unprecedented is that kind of increase?
The Cato Institute has been on a roll lately with guest appearances and soundbites, six total in a span of four months, five criticizing the Trump Administration on immigration, including two guest appearances on the subject by their director of immigration studies David Bier. Before Bier, the last guest appearance by a Cato scholar came in May 2021.
When limited-government libertarian scholars get this much love in the big-government-supporting legacy press, one may assume they’re taking a line that happens to be sympathetic to the liberal media agenda.
At least PBS usually gets the “libertarian” terminology right when identifying Cato’s ideology, but on Tuesday, Barron-Lopez called the group “conservative.”
Barron–Lopez: Well, it's incredibly unprecedented. I spoke to David Bier, who is the director of immigration studies at the conservative Cato Institute. And David Bier said that the administration has already moved a significant number of ATF agents, of DEA agents over to help immigration enforcement. And now this bill will dramatically increase ICE's capabilities on top of that.
Bier previously appeared with Barron-Lopez April 29 and appeared in a supportive soundbite on March 13.
David Bier, Director of Immigration Studies, Cato Institute: Under this bill, if -- by 2028, you're talking about spending effectively 80 percent of all federal law enforcement dollars will go to immigration enforcement. And so when you think about the scale that we are prioritizing this type of enforcement over all other types of crimes, everything you can think of is being deprioritized to focus on deportations. And primarily it's going to be deportations of people without any criminal record, without any arrest record.
Barron–Lopez: So, as Bier said, law enforcement being moved from other types of operations, other -- prioritizing other types of crimes to specifically focusing on immigration enforcement. And David Bier warned that the impact of this law will mean that ICE raids could very well become an everyday part of American life and hit communities that it hasn't necessarily hit already. He warned that he thinks there could be an increase of racial profiling, including of American citizens. And we have seen some American citizens get caught up in these ICE operations already, some arrested, some put in handcuffs, and he is concerned that that will only increase….
She warned Trump’s deportation would be coming for even more “undocumented immigrants,” while favoring the perspective of left-wing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who accused the administration of "ramping up the chaos."
Barron–Lopez: ….David Bier and other experts that I have talked to said that now they expect the administration to increase their targeting of undocumented immigrants that are either recent arrivals or ones who had their legal status stripped away more recently. And we saw that increased -- those increased operations already in Los Angeles this week, where there were troops as well as ICE agents and military vehicles that descended on MacArthur Park. This is near a predominantly Latino neighborhood. And the -- Karen Bass, the L.A. mayor there, said that this is another example of the administration ratcheting up the chaos….
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A transcript is available, click "Expand."
PBS News Hour
7/8/25
7:29:47 p.m. (ET)
Amna Nawaz: This week, 10 people were charged with attempted murder of federal agents after a July 4 attack on an immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas. Fireworks were shot at the facility and a police officer responding to the scene was shot in the neck.
The acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas said that last week's events were — quote — "an ambush of federal and local law enforcement officers."
The charges come as immigration agents just received a major infusion of funding to carry out President Trump's deportation agenda. The big budget bill passed by Republicans includes billions for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, giving it more funding than any other federal law enforcement agency.
But speaking at his Cabinet meeting today, the president suggested that the administration might not need to spend as much as he thought.
Donald Trump, President of the United States: I don't think we're going to need so much of it, because we had zero come in last month, so I'm not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may think about that. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall's been largely built, and it obviously worked. But you may want to think about that.
Amna Nawaz: Our White House correspondent, Laura Barron – Lopez, joins us now with the latest.
So, Laura, we heard the president there seem to downplay the need to use all of the money that was allocated for his deportation agenda. What should we understand about that?
Laura Barron – Lopez: So the president is somewhat right in that the numbers of border crossings are down. It's not zero. According to his border czar, Tom Homan, the June 2025 numbers, just over 6,000 border crossings occurred, compared to more than 83,000 during that same time in 2024. But it's not zero.
Now, when it comes to whether or not the administration is going to spend the money that's allocated in this bill, the border czar, Tom Homan, as well as Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have made very clear that they intend on spending the billions in this bill. Tom Homan said this week that they want to arrest 7,000 people every day for the remainder of the administration.
Amna Nawaz: So billions allocated in the bill. Break it down for us. Where are those billions going?
Laura Barron – Lopez: So, total, there's more than $160 billion that are going to immigration enforcement and the deportation operation. So when you break it down, that means $46.5 billion to building the rest of the border wall, $45 billion to immigration detention centers, nearly $30 billion to hiring and training ICE staff, and $3.3 billion to immigration court judges and attorneys.
Now, some of those pots of money can be moved around. If they don't want to spend that much on the border wall, they don't have to. They can transfer it to other parts of ICE. But ICE plans to hire an additional 10,000 new agents to the tens of thousands they already have. And also they want to have at least 80,000 new detention beds.
Amna Nawaz: So that increase in funding for ICE, for immigration enforcement, how unprecedented is that kind of increase?
Laura Barron – Lopez: Well, it's incredibly unprecedented.
I spoke to David Bier, who is the director of immigration studies at the conservative Cato Institute. And David Bier said that the administration has already moved a significant number of ATF agents, of DEA agents over to help immigration enforcement. And now this bill will dramatically increase ICE's capabilities on top of that.
David Bier, Director of Immigration Studies, Cato Institute: Under this bill, if — by 2028, you're talking about spending effectively 80 percent of all federal law enforcement dollars will go to immigration enforcement.
And so when you think about the scale that we are prioritizing this type of enforcement over all other types of crimes, everything you can think of is being deprioritized to focus on deportations. And primarily it's going to be deportations of people without any criminal record, without any arrest record.
Laura Barron – Lopez: So, as Bier said, law enforcement being moved from other types of operations, other — prioritizing other types of crimes to specifically focusing on immigration enforcement. And David Bier warned that the impact of this law will mean that ICE raids could very well become an everyday part of American life and hit communities that it hasn't necessarily hit already.
He warned that he thinks there could be an increase of racial profiling, including of American citizens. And we have seen some American citizens get caught up in these ICE operations already, some arrested, some put in handcuffs, and he is concerned that that will only increase.
Now, another impact of this, according to David Bier's and the Cato Institute's number-crunching, and they did this by looking also at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Offices estimate, but that they estimate that the U.S., according — because of this bill, is going to lose some $900 billion in tax revenue that is paid by these immigrants who are potentially going to be picked up and deported by the administration.
Amna Nawaz: So we have seen this dramatic increase in funding for ICE. You talked about scaling up ICE's capabilities on the ground, everyday ICE operations, as David Bier said. What does that look like in practice?
Laura Barron – Lopez: I spoke to a number of former ICE officials, Amna, and they said that reaching that additional 10,000 ICE agents, hiring up that many ICE agents, is not necessarily an easy feat, and that they could end up using the money to hire out contractors that could help ICE agents, that could supplement their operations.
I spoke to Josh Sandweg, the former ICE director, and when he was looking at the big picture, he told me that this bill is ultimately going to allow the Trump administration to build an enforcement and deportation apparatus that is much harder for any future president to dismantle or to try to downsize.
Josh Sandweg, Former Acting ICE Director: This infusion of capital is not just about the near term and about increasing the size of ICE during the Trump administration, but I think it's also about building an immigration enforcement system that will sustain a much higher number of deportations, not just in the next 2.5, three years, but in the next 10 years.
We're going to see an ICE, that it is going to be hard for any future administration to shrink it, and its capacity to deport will certainly be at the highest level it's ever been in the history of the United States.
Laura Barron – Lopez: Now, Josh Sandweg and other former ICE officials told me that they expect private prison contractors to be a big — to play a big role in creating these detention centers, those billions that are going to be allocated to detention centers.
They expect that a lot of private prison companies are going to be getting the majority of that money in order to build out these facilities, and what they expect in the near term is soft-sided facilities. Those tent facilities like the Alligator Alcatraz in Florida are what is expected to be built more quickly because it's a lot harder to build brick-and-mortar facilities.
Amna Nawaz: Laura, you have reported on this during his campaign. Initially, in office, President Trump said he was focusing on violent criminals, on public safety threats. We have seen ICE has gone far beyond that already, so who is and will be targeted for arrest moving forward?
Laura Barron – Lopez: The bottom line, Amna, is that there is no way to reach that 7,000 daily arrests that Tom Homan and the administration is talking about without expanding their targets.
Now, ICE arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and the UCLA Center for Immigration Law shows that a majority of the undocumented immigrants that have been arrested since Trump took office did not have a criminal conviction. And David Bier and other experts that I have talked to said that now they expect the administration to increase their targeting of undocumented immigrants that are either recent arrivals or ones who had their legal status stripped away more recently.
And we saw that increased — those increased operations already in Los Angeles this week, where there were troops as well as ICE agents and military vehicles that descended on MacArthur Park. This is near a predominantly Latino neighborhood. And the — Karen Bass, the L.A. mayor there, said that this is another example of the administration ratcheting up the chaos.
But bottom line is that there is an expectation that more and more operations are going to be carried out in communities and at worksites like Home Depots and other areas across the country.
Amna Nawaz: Our White House correspondent, Laura Barron – Lopez, thank you.
Laura Barron – Lopez: Thank you.
