The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has seen its budget dramatically increase, becoming the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency. This surge in funding, driven by recent legislation and appropriations, has fueled a significant expansion of ICE's operations and its detention capacity, leading to increased scrutiny and criticism.
— notably smaller than other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security. But ICE 's budget has skyrocketed during President Trump's second term, becoming the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with, enacted last July.
After hovering around the $10 billion mark for years, ICE's budget suddenly benefited from a meteoric spike. "With this new bill and other appropriations, it's larger than the annual budget of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined," said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute. ICE is now the lead agency in President's Trump immigration crackdown, sending thousands of agents into U.S. communities. As its funding and profile has grown as part of those efforts, ICE has come under increasing criticism for its officers' actions, from masked agents randomly stopping, questioning, and detaining people andICE's sudden growth spurt follows roughly two decades of relatively modest funding since 2003, when the agency was created by merging the U.S. Customs Service with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In 2015, for instance, Congress approved a budget of around $5.96 billion, which wasUnder the 2025 law, ICE has a $75 billion supplement that it can take as long as four years to spend, along with its base budget of around $10 billion. If the agency spends that money at a steady pace and current funding levels continue, it would have nearly $29 billion on hand each year. That essentially triples ICE's total budget from recent years.. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act also allocates $45 billion for ICE to expand its immigration detention system — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last June that the agency will be able to hold up to 100,000 people in custody daily. With those metrics in mind, ICE went on a hiring spree in 2025, fueled by its bigger budget. In just one year,, it"more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000." (The Office of Personnel Management, which tracks federal workforce statistics,ICE is still on that hiring spree, looking to hire deportation officers in at least 25 cities around the U.S., according to a job listing on thethat will remain active through the end of September. The starting salary for an ICE deportation officer in the Enforcement and Removal Operations division, or ERO, ranges from $51,632 up to $84,277.With base level funding for DHS and ICE due to expire at the end of January, Democrats in Congress areICE's increased budget makes sense to Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group advocating for lower levels of immigration. He says the funding boost"is directly commensurate with the size of the task the agency is addressing." "ICE exists to find and remove people who are in the country illegally," Mehlman said, referring to a category that grew when the Trump administration The focus of the new spending reflects President Trump's emphasis on arrests and removals, said Margy O'Herron, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center's liberty and national security program who worked at the DOJ in the Biden administration. O'Herron said she agrees with the idea that, for years, a reasonable case could be made that DHS agencies such as ICE and CBP needed more money. But other parts of the immigration system aren't getting as much help, she said. "All of the money is going to enforcement to arrest, to detain and to deport," she said."It's not going to things like immigration hearings or immigration judges, to conduct additional review of whether or not somebody should be in the country. And that is a real problem for the system." Bill Chappell is a correspondent and editor, and a leader on NPR's flagship digital news team. He has frequently contributed to NPR's audio and social media platforms, including hosting dozens of live shows online.
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