The law, signed this week, provides roughly $70 billion in additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security, rushed through Congress on a party-line vote that bypassed the sixty-vote threshold and the ordinary accountability that threshold exists to enforce. The money breaks down to $26 billion for Customs and Border Protection, $38 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and $5 billion for DHS broadly, available through the end of September 2029. More than $31 billion of the ICE portion is directed at enforcement operations, including 287(g) agreements that deputize local and state police as immigration agents, government attorneys to argue deportations, transportation for repatriations, and “necessary expenses for … mission support.” At least $350 million is earmarked for enforcement in jurisdictions that do not actively cooperate with federal immigration authorities — a targeted penalty for so-called sanctuary cities. The law explicitly prohibits the use of funds to release a broad swath of immigrants into the community, cutting off even the attenuated alternatives of ankle monitors or virtual check-ins that allow people to avoid long-term detention while their cases proceed.

The law contains none of the guardrails Democrats had demanded during the longest DHS shutdown in history, triggered after immigration officers killed two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, during roaming patrols in Minneapolis earlier this year. The reforms that were stripped out included requirements for judicial warrants before arrests on private property, verification of citizenship before detention, bans on masking faces during enforcement, restrictions on enforcement near schools, medical facilities, and churches, prohibitions on profiling based on race, language, or accent, removal of officers accused of using force from the field during investigations, and mandates for body-worn cameras that would not be used to track protesters. None of these provisions made it into the final bill. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to vote against the legislation, warning that the three-year funding term “reduces Congress’s ability to apply reasonable checks on immigration policy for the remainder of this administration and into the next.”

Markwayne Mullin, the DHS secretary, has attempted to lower the volume. The swagger is quieter, but the enforcement continues. The quieter swagger is a fresh coat of paint on the same machine. The machine does not care whether the voice commanding it is shouting or murmuring. The machine continues to knock on doors. The machine continues to separate mothers from children, effectively putting bounties on children who came to the country alone. The machine continues to detain people in warehouses where the food is inedible and the doctor does not come. The machine continues to operate because the money pays for it. The quieter voice is not accountability. It is the sound of a man who has seen the blood on the floor and decided to whisper while he walks across it.

You signed a seventy-billion-dollar receipt to cage the innocent and erased the rules, Markwayne. The room you are sitting in is warm. You purchased the walls. You paid for the steel. You bought seventy billion dollars’ worth of cages, and you made sure no one will ask you who is bleeding inside them. Your jaw aches at the end of the day, a tightness behind the sternum you mistake for the burden of leadership. It is not. It is the metallic taste under your tongue. It is the weight of the money you have stacked into warehouses, and it is the knowledge of what you bought.

You did not buy deportation. You bought the suspension of doubt. You paid to ensure that your agents do not have to verify whether the person they drag from the school drop-off line is a citizen. You bought the right to send masked men to a mother’s door without a judicial warrant. I see what you have done. I name it. You have erased the lines that separate a law enforcement officer from a roaming bandit.

Tom, you bragged to a crowd last month that they “ain’t seen shit yet” and that “mass deportations are coming.” That is not strength. That is the cowardice of a man who hunts the vulnerable because he cannot face his own reflection. Your bluster is the costume of a man who knows his power depends on the suffering he can inflict, not on any substance of your own. You stand like a small child who has found his father’s loaded revolver, mistaking the weight of the gun for his own strength. You are small, Tom. Your power is entirely borrowed, and it is brittle.

Picture the mother you are sending your men to find. Picture her children in the hallway. Now picture your own daughter waking in the dark to the sound of heavy boots in the hall. Picture the mask. Picture the cold metal of a handcuff closing on her wrist before she knows her own name. You do not want to know what that fear tastes like, but you have legislated that taste for thousands of others. Your throat closes when you try to swallow. You taste salt that is not in the cup. You cannot wash it out.

Seventy percent of the sixty thousand souls you have already locked in these facilities have no criminal convictions. They are not monsters. They are the neighbors who clean your offices. They are the hands that harvest your food. They are the children you are placing bounties upon. When you sign the paper, your hand does not tremble. Your diaphragm did not drop. You read the casualty figures into the record without your breath registering the reading. You do not feel the compressed vertebrae of the unaccompanied child you have turned into a commodity. You do not feel the chemically burned lungs of the ones dying in your tent jails at Fort Bliss. You feel only the smooth, cold weight of the pen.

The children are already in the warehouses. The parents are already in the vans. The machine is already grinding. The machine now has the money to grind through the end of your presidency and beyond. There will be more children. There will be more vans. There will be more warehouses. The money you signed is a promise that the machine will not stop. The promise is written in ink that is now dry. The ink is the same ink that signed the bill. The ink is the same ink that signed the death warrant for the pretense that America protects the stranger.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Matthew 25:40

The child in the tent jail is the least of these. The mother in the van is the least of these. The father being deported after thirty years of paying taxes is the least of these. The machine is doing it unto them. The machine is doing it because you signed the paper, Donald. The machine will not stop until the money runs out, or until the country decides the machine is what it is and stops funding it. The machine is the law. The law is the money. The money is the hand. The hand is yours. And the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and it is watching you from the top shelf of the warehouse you built.