A More Militarized World is Not a Safer One

UNITED STATES – Last Friday, the White House requested $8.7 billion dollars in additional funding for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including $4.5 billion dollars for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and $2.5 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This funding would add over a thousand border patrol agents to the already largest law enforcement agency in the country, increase immigration detention capacity, and continue to outsource militarized immigration enforcement to other countries. 

The Defund Hate campaign, a coalition of groups that advocates for decreased funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), rejects this funding and offered the following statement:

“ICE and CBP are granted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars a year, and as a campaign, we reject any proposal that provides these agencies additional funding to surveil, detain, deport, and militarize communities. There are already over 35,000 people in ICE detention – the highest number under the Biden administration. For decades, U.S. border regions have endured massive, wasteful, and unchecked militarization of border enforcement, including the addition of over a thousand Border Patrol agents, a vast network of Border Patrol checkpoints located up to 100 miles into the interior, active duty troops, the National Guard, invasive surveillance and military technologies, and hundreds of miles of border wall. Border Patrol’s militarized border policies are deeply rooted in the United States’s history of over-policing and military occupation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. 

We demand that our elected officials immediately reprioritize and fulfill their duty to provide the public services that people desperately need instead of spending money on immigration enforcement and weapons to send abroad. We adamantly reject that a more militarized world with more weapons is a safer one. We adamantly reject that we must live in a world where we punish communities for seeking safety.”

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The Defund Hate campaign is a coalition of groups that advocates for decreased funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Learn more at defundhatenow.org