The One Big Bill the Trump administration includes a massive expansion of funding for “border security,” ICE, and other anti-immigrant functions of the Department of Fatherland Security. This will produce a corresponding massive increase in corruption.
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In the case of ICE, the need for all this money is not urgent, or well-defined, or well-understood. Lots of this money could easily go missing — 10 million here, 10 million there — with no one noticing, or caring, since every existing part of the agency is already enjoying it’s own bonanza of extravagant over-budgeting.
Add to this the fact that the Trump administration has already DOGE’d away every government watchdog, inspector general, GAO researcher, etc. — meaning nobody is watching where this money is going — and it’s basically open season.
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That’s also true of some of the extreme corruption that will swallow 50% or more of the $45 billion tabbed to build new camps and detention centers. Hundreds of millions of those dollars will simply be absorbed by the layers upon layers of middlemen who will sniff out the opportunity created by this huge new unaccountable slush fund. There will be consultants hired to select the consultants who will hire more consultants, with each tier taking a cut of the spending like a club sandwich of corruption. All of that will be shady, but probably still technically legal. But then there will also be more extreme forms of corruption. Years from now we will learn about phantom detention centers — movie-set facades that collected years of funding to feed and house phantom detainees who existed only as fake names on a computer screen.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2025/07/15/secret-police-slush-fund-is-gonna-be-so-corrupt/It's like the bonanza for Covid PPE - suddenly, people with well-placed friends in the Trump regime will be brand-new concentration camp experts, meaning they are experts at diverting a torrent of cash into their offshore accounts.
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