70% of ICE Detainees Have No Criminal Record. $1.7 Trillion Dollars for This?

I’m writing as a middle-class American whose family is feeling squeezed. Tariffs are adding about $1,400 a year to our household costs, according to Yale Budget Lab. Goldman Sachs says AI is quietly cutting roughly 16,000 white-collar jobs a month. And Congress just put $170 billion toward immigration enforcement, $45 billion of that for detention alone. That’s more than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons budget. This isn’t how the people I know want their tax dollars spent. The enforcement we’re paying for isn’t going after criminals. As of April 2026, more than 70% of people in ICE detention had no criminal conviction at all. The Cato Institute, a libertarian group, found only 5% have a violent one. More people died in ICE custody in 2025 than in the previous four years combined. The people being detained are college students, parents, neighbors who have lived here twenty or thirty years and never broken a law. That isn’t safety and it’s traumatizing whole communities. The economics aren’t subtle. Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022, including $25.7 billion into Social Security they will never collect. About 42% of the people who grow our food have no legal work authorization. The American Immigration Council estimates mass deportation would shrink GDP by $1.1 to $1.7 trillion, on the scale of the Great Recession. A majority of Americans, 53% in recent Pew polling, say this administration is doing too much. Pope Leo XIV called the treatment “extremely disrespectful” and at times “inhuman.” The U.S. Catholic Bishops voted formally to oppose indiscriminate mass deportation. In the past year, immigration agents have shot at least 34 people and killed nine. Some were American citizens. Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas. Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Keith Porter Jr. in Los Angeles. Americans, killed by federal agents during civil immigration operations, and most of us learned their names only after the fact. Please co-sponsor the Dignity Act of 2025 (H.R. 4393) and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025 (H.R. 3227). Vote against further detention funding in the FY2026 DHS appropriations bill. We need a DOJ Inspector General investigation into agent shootings of U.S. citizens. End blanket raids on workplaces, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. Focus enforcement on people who have actually hurt someone. 97% of Americans already agree on that one.