The massive budget reconciliation bill just passed by the Senate targets basic public services like Medicaid and food assistance, while significantly increasing total immigration enforcement, detention, and border security funding to nearly $200 billion for fiscal year 2025 alone. This is orders of magnitude more than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have received in the past.
Meanwhile, this week, heads of state are meeting in Seville, Spain, for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4). Rich countries are watering down their commitments to support poorer countries, which are already facing debt crises, development crises, and a global climate crisis not of their making. It’s a brutal echo of Congress’s dismantling of the infrastructure that provides for people’s basic needs here at home.
Notably, the $200 billion Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants is more than the 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) that is the widely recognized UN target for donor countries to spend on foreign assistance. In 2023, the US GNI was approximately $27.5 trillion, with 0.7% of that amount being $193 billion.
In reality, U.S. foreign assistance has never come close to the 0.7% goal. In 2023, all US foreign aid together totaled only $71 billion; $20 billion of that was to Ukraine and Israel alone. At least 10% of the $71 billion is openly acknowledged as military aid rather than anything supporting the needs of everyday people.
On food security, UN Food and Agriculture Organization data shows that average flows of food assistance from ALL donor countries was about $76 billion per year from 2017-2021, about 2.5 times less than what Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants.
On global health, the Trump administration recently withdrew from the Gavi global vaccine alliance, calling on Gavi to “justify” U.S. contributions of about $8 billion since 2001. Gavi has provided over 1 billion vaccinations globally, and the U.S. $8 billion contribution, if annualized over 25 years, amounts to 625 times less than the $200 billion Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants.
On climate change, the total annual target for climate finance from ALL developed countries from 2020-2035 is $100 billion – half of what Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants. Actual annual flows of climate finance have been closer to $20 billion, according to Oxfam, one-tenth of what Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants.
The U.S. has contributed a total of $2 billion to the Green Climate Fund, the world’s flagship multilateral fund for supporting climate action in developing countries, over the last 10 years, 1,000 times less annually than the $200 billion Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants. And the U.S. contributed $17.5 million to the new Fund for Responding to Loss & Damage, which is supposed to be the flagship UN fund for supporting developing countries recovering from climate impacts like floods, hurricanes and sea level rise. That’s a whopping 11,428 times less than the $200 billion Congress wants to spend on detaining and deporting immigrants.
In response, ActionAid USA’s Director of Policy and Campaigns, Brandon Wu, said:
“In recent months, ICE has been increasingly operating as Trump’s secret police force – with masked and unidentified agents literally kidnapping people off the streets, including arresting and detaining US citizens and even elected officials. It’s not much of an overstatement to say this would essentially be a blank check for Trump’s version of the Gestapo.
This also makes it clear that the line ‘governments don’t have enough money to tackle the world’s social problems’ is, and was always, complete nonsense. The so-called ‘immigration crisis’ isn’t a real crisis at all, but this bill shows that if people in power decide something is a problem, they absolutely have the ability to mobilize resources to address it. While the Trump administration prioritizes making autocratic white nationalism official policy, it is inadvertently demonstrating that with different priorities, the U.S. could play a much more constructive role in solving global debt, development, and climate crises than it ever has.”
ENDS
For media requests, please email christal.james@actionaid.org or call 7046659743.
About ActionAid
ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 41 million people living in more than 71 countries, including some of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty, including by shifting power to local organizations and movements.
