The 2010 budget passed by the U.S. Congress does not allocate specific funds to support a path to citizenship for existing illegal immigrants in the United States, merely mentioning in passing the improvement and upgrading of application procedures for legal immigrants. Regarding immigration issues, the budget actually focuses on strict enforcement.
Regarding the Department of Homeland Security's provisions on strengthening border security and immigration services, the budget points out that the federal government will allocate $45 million to expand border security priorities such as the critical land port of entry security program; and provide an additional $368 million to the existing Customs and Border Protection fund to deploy 20,000 patrol officers to guard the nearly 6,000-mile-long U.S. border.
It allocates $1.4 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ensure that law enforcement officers can quickly identify illegal immigrants with criminal records and deport them; it allocates $110 million to continue expanding the E-Verify employment eligibility verification program to assist employers in complying with immigration laws and ensure that U.S. job opportunities are reserved for U.S. citizens and those with work permits; the budget will also strengthen services for legal immigrants by improving and upgrading immigration application procedures.
At the same time, the budget also provides the federal Department of Justice with the necessary enforcement, detention, and prosecution resources to ensure national border security; it allocates an additional $286 million for comprehensive enforcement, combining law enforcement personnel and prosecution procedures to investigate, arrest, detain, and prosecute illegal immigrant criminals, and to improve the Department of Justice's ability to track immigration fugitives, arms smugglers, and illegal drug traffickers.
