So far, experts widely agree that a lack of manpower has held back President Donald Trump’s planned mass deportation campaign. 

But a spike in funding for immigration enforcement and changes to the court system under the recently passed “Big Beautiful Bill” could make those plans a reality in Nevada — a state with one of the highest shares of undocumented people.

The budget reconciliation bill dramatically boosts funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which currently has an annual budget of approximately $10 billion. It pumps more than $45 billion into expanding detention capacity nationwide, while funneling more than $29.9 billion toward the agencies’ enforcement operations through 2029.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the funding would “further deliver on President Trump’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!”

Although the bill did not outline where the money would go in Nevada, lawyers and immigrant advocacy groups say they are preparing for an increase in ICE arrests and presence — a concern that has already elicited fears in Nevada’s undocumented population of nearly 200,000.

"It's escalated to a point that we've never seen before,” Leo Murrieta, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Make the Road Action, told The Nevada Independent in an interview.

Recent months have seen a marked escalation in immigration enforcement activity in Nevada. The Trump administration has set a goal of 75 arrests per day in each field office —  more than seven times the standard from the past four years at the agency’s Salt Lake City office, which oversees Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana.

Although arrests aren’t up sevenfold, they have tripled in Nevada. From the time Trump took the oath of office in January to mid-June 2025, immigration arrests in Nevada have jumped nearly 300 percent compared with the same time period in 2024, for a total of 940 arrests. 

In early June, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department entered a formal partnership with ICE to hold undocumented people for a longer period of time in its facilities — the third police agency in the state to enter such an agreement. Meanwhile, in Northern Nevada, more than 50 people were arrested in ICE operations this May. 

Murrieta said that he now expects these enforcement efforts to go into “overdrive.” 

The bill would also fund 10,000 new ICE agents, expanding an agency that has 20,000 total personnel. Even though there’s no publicly available data on the number of ICE agents stationed in Nevada, Michael Kagan, director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, said that the nationwide increase in agents will likely still have an impact on the state.

“When ICE stages a major operation right now … it typically has needed to bring in agents from elsewhere in the country,” said Kagan, whose clinic defends people against deportation. “So an increase in arrests in a place like Los Angeles could actually mean a reduction in ICE activity elsewhere … But if they can hire 10,000 more agents, they might be able to do operations like in Los Angeles in multiple cities around the country at a time.”

The increase in ICE manpower could also lead to an increase in the arrests of women and children, Kagan said. So far, the number of women and families detained by ICE has remained minimal, likely because of a lack of proper facilities and medical accommodations. 

As of early July, only 15 women were detained in Nevada out of the nearly 370 total detainees, all of them at the Henderson Detention Center, according to ICE data. There is no publicly available data on how many children are detained in Nevada. 

ICE detention centers in Nevada have already struggled with overcrowding. As of April 2025, the Nevada Southern Detention Center — the state’s largest ICE holding facility — exceeded its contractual capacity of 250 people by more than 200, holding a total of 462 people, according to data obtained by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Meanwhile, in February, CoreCivic, the private company that oversees the facility, entered into a new contract to increase capacity for up to a total of 800 detainees at the Nevada Southern Detention Center. 

“Not being a border state doesn't really have much to do with it,” Kagan said. “There's every reason to think that this will have an immense effect on our community here.”

Changes to the immigration court system

In addition to expanding ICE capacity, the budget reconciliation bill caps the number of immigration nationwide judges at 800 — a slight increase from the approximately 700 judges currently serving. The bill includes $3.3 billion to the immigration court system, but given the cap on judges, those funds are likely not to be fully expended, according to progressive organizations. 

It all could spell additional trouble for an immigration court system that has been riddled by staffing shortages, especially after post-pandemic restrictions on immigration were lifted. Nationwide, the system faces a backlog of nearly 4 million cases. In Nevada, there are about 20,000 pending immigration cases as of June 2025, taking an average of about 1.5 years to be completed. 

The caps on immigration judges coupled with an increase in detention rates could further escalate concerns that the Trump administration is tossing out due process for immigrants it is seeking to deport, especially given recent rounds of firings of judges, Kagan suggested. 

“The fact that in this massive funding bill, they have put an unfathomable amount of new money into enforcement, while basically not giving more money for judges — this tells you everything you need to know,” Kagan said.  

The bill would also make it significantly more difficult for people to apply for immigration benefits in the first place, requiring that individuals seeking asylum — previously free —  pay a minimum fee of $100. It would also create fees for different immigration benefits, such as a $250 work permit fee for asylees and an “integrity” fee for visa applications for temporary stays in the U.S.

Entire classes of authorized immigrants — including refugees — will also now be ineligible for Medicaid and food stamps.  According to the state, there are about 10,500 refugees, asylees and non-citizen parolees in Nevada who are losing their SNAP eligibility. 

“To think that at a time when folks are struggling to be able to afford groceries and rent, their utility bills, this bill would gut those programs,” Murrieta said.