ICE Funding for Housing

SOLVE THE HOUSING CRISIS BY SOLVING THE ICE CRISIS

We are living through a crisis of community. We have neighbors being dragged out of their homes to be separated from their families and locked up in inhumane detention camps. And we have neighbors simply losing their homes amid rising prices and stagnant income. Imagine investing our tax dollars back into our communities instead of subsidizing wars against immigrants–not to mention Iran, Palestine, Venezuela, and others.

The costs of “border” enforcement

The yearly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) budget spiked to nearly $30 billion last year.i ICE is the lead agency that has been kidnapping people off the streets, from workplaces, and other places formerly considered off-limits—schools, churches, hospitals, and even courts where immigrants must go to meet legal requirements of the immigration process. And these agents have typically worn masks and refused to identify themselves.

But ICE is a segment of a larger system; nine-tenths of the ICEburg is not readily visible. The whole burg is the extensive border militarization program whose “borders” have been expanding throughout the world, particularly across Latin America. And with the recent expansion of ICE throughout the USA, we now include the entirety of our country in that list of militarized zones.ii Last July, a total of $350 billion was authorized for immigration enforcement over four years. That includes funding for enforcement along the actual USA borders (most of which is to go for a border wall) as well as for greatly expanded immigrant prisons. That is nearly $90 billion each year. And given the present spending trend, we may see even more money be requested before the end of the four year period.

Perpetuating the cycle

Looking at the bigger picture, the whole immigration enforcement package is itself part of the larger ever-expanding militarization of and beyond the planet. A good deal of that militarization, along with the unsustainable lifestyles it is designed to protect, serves to destabilize much of the rest of the world and thereby create even more pressure for immigration.

This is not new; the USA has a long history of militarizing and otherwise undermining democracy throughout much of the world, especially in Latin America where most USA immigrants come from.

Of late, our government has been expanding that, spending over a billion dollars a day to bomb people in Iran, creating yet more refugees who need homes.

Getting information on just how much of that military and related spending contributes to the ever-growing refugee crisis is perhaps impossible to accurately determine. But, making the conservative assumptions that some limited federal immigration enforcement is warranted, and that ten percent of the trillion-dollar-plus military budget is directly or indirectly responsible for half of undocumented immigration (the actual amount is probably much more), we’ll round off to a conservative $200 billion a year total.

What if we spent that on housing

If the yearly $30 billion for ICE itself were instead used for affordable housing, we estimateiii it could provide upwards of 100 new units yearly in Grand Rapids, and at least 300 new units in Kent County as a whole. That amount alone could make a real dent in our housing crisis. Also, that $200 billion is a small fraction of the yearly income hoarded by money addicts who have become the de facto oligarchy which militarization is most designed to protect. Still we ask: What would Grand Rapids’s and Kent County’s shares of that $200 billion accomplish if used instead to help address the present housing crisis? See this table for estimates:

Poorly defined, usually ignored

Even advocates for affordable housing differ widely on what is considered affordable. At GRfAH we focus on those with the least—those without shelter at all, those with temporary shelter such as shelter programs for people otherwise homeless, those with inadequate shelter such as vehicles or abandoned buildings, those doubled up and/or overcrowded, and those at the lowest income levels who have housing, but for whom housing stability is often threatened.

Who are these people at the bottom of our class system? And how many of our neighbors fit these definitions? In early 2025, 1238 of our neighbors, including nearly 300 children, were known to be homeless according to HUD’s strict definitionv. There are certainly many more. Unfortunately there is little information on those in unstable housing situations who do not qualify for the federal definition of “homeless”. Some data from the Federal Reserve does give some idea, noting that over a third of households nationally do not even have $400 to meet an emergency—that’s about 100 million adults, with children somewhere in the tens of millions. For those who identify as Black and/or Hispanic, over half of households are in such precarity.

Further data from the National Coalition to End Homelessness also can give clues. Inferring from their national data, see the following table for Grand Rapids and Kent County estimates:

GR has known we need more units

Our city and county have known we need more units. The latest Housing Needs Assessment from Housing Kent says that for the lowest income groupix, Grand Rapids needs about 1500 new rental units and the rest of Kent County needs five hundred by 2029.

The funding that goes to ICE alone could meet most of that need, though there is another barrier dubbed “step-down”: Those in higher income brackets often purchase properties that are less costly than what they can afford. That problem could be dealt with by limiting availability of those most affordable properties to those in the lowest income group. That same assessment notes that we need much more if we consider severely cost burdened householdsx. However, the transfer of the funding from the entire border control apparatus toward housing would easily cover the additional units needed while also at least substantially addressing the step-down problem.

Always money for war, never money for the poor

Whenever people suggest investment in the unhoused, it is always met with the question, “where will the money come from?” Where does the money come from to rip people from their homes? Or the money to build the camps we then throw them into? Where does the money come from to bomb people in Iran and elsewhere? Where does the money come from to give tax breaks to the oligarchs?

We could use just a fraction of what is spent on these to make sure every person has a stable place to call home. That is where the money should come from.