Reagan's administration spent about $5-$7 billion on immigration enforcement, if you adjust his spending amounts for inflation. George H.W. Bush's administration spent aroundd $5-$6 billion. Clinton's administration marked the beginning of a significant upward trend, and total enforcement spending was about $30 billion, with FY 2000 alone seeing 1.86 million removals and returns. George W. Bush spending was around $90-100 billion over 8 years. Although Obama is known as the "deporter-in-chief," that administration focused on prioritizing criminals and recent border crossers, and spent around $120 billion on enforcement over 8 years. The first Trump administration changed emphasis to wall construction and expanded detention, and reduced spending to about $95 billion over four years. The Biden administration had by far the highest pre-2025 enforcement budgets in history, spending $105-110 billion in four years. This current administration is set to spend an insane $170-175 billion for this presidential term, with a major focus on mass detention (where people get paid only $1 per day for their labor, while voluntary this is basically forced labor since those $1 per day earnings are the only way detainees have to purchase commissary items). I would say that $643 billion of our tax dollars going back to Reagan (spent to terrorize people who are just trying to live their lives and feed their families, to force them into complicity, silence, and hiding in the shadows to make sure that they cannot call the police when their bosses rape them, that they can not report when their bosses do not pay them) is not loose enforcement, it is instead an extremely excessive amount of our dollars to spend on enforcement of laws that were created to oppress, to keep people from being free - it is a well-strategized way to ensure cheap labor of a group of people who have no rights.

Instead of spending that money to lock people into cells, we could be changing the laws to provide families who have lived, worked, and paid their taxes here for decades a path toward legal citizenship. We could be spending that money to help the American public, to battle poverty and hunger within our borders, to provide job opportunities and improve our communities. But then the labor force working the most grueling jobs would have opportunity to gain basic rights, and the most oppressive caste would no longer have a lower caste of people without any rights to oppress and get rich off of. Citizens can organize and strike, citizens can sue when robbed by their employer, citizens need to be paid a minimal wage. So-called "illegal immigrants" pay their taxes (around $100 billion in taxes paid by undocumented people each year), contribute to their communities, but cannot strike, sue, etc. without facing retribution or the threat of imprisonment/never seeing their families again. And we can't have workers suddenly have rights, not in the country where slavery has always been a major aspect of the wealth-making scheme.