What was ICE's annual budget each year from 2009 to 2016 during the Obama administration?
Executive summary
The clearest, source-backed figures in the provided reporting cover ICE’s total enacted budgets for FY2009 and FY2010: roughly $5.928 billion in FY2009 and about $5.741 billion in FY2010, consistent with ICE fact sheets and independent tracking by TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse) [1] [2]. The assembled sources do not supply year-by-year, authoritative ICE total-budget figures for FY2011–FY2016 within the material provided, and GAO reporting emphasizes that ICE frequently relied on supplemental and intra‑DHS transfers beyond annual appropriations—an important caveat for any simple year-by-year accounting [3] [4].
1. FY2009–FY2010: the numbers that can be documented from the provided sources
ICE’s total budget for FY2009 is reported in TRAC’s compiled table as $5,928 million (i.e., $5.928 billion) and TRAC’s summary shows FY2010 at $5,741 million (about $5.741 billion) — figures that align with ICE’s own public statements that the agency’s budget in the FY2010 period was “more than $5.7 billion” [1] [2]. ICE’s FY2009 materials also describe new funding priorities that year — expanded interior enforcement, detention beds and programs such as Secure Communities — but the provided ICE fact sheet for FY2009 does not itself present a single-line consolidated total in the snippets supplied here beyond the TRAC compilation [5] [6].
2. Why the record blurs after 2010: supplemental funding, transfers, and reporting gaps
The GAO has documented that in recent years ICE has frequently relied on funding beyond its annual appropriations—supplementals, intra‑DHS transfers, and budgetary shifts that can total hundreds of millions annually—and that ICE’s own reporting and budget projections have required additional review to fully reconcile these movements [3] [4]. The reporting provided for this exercise does not include ICE’s FY2011–FY2016 enacted totals in a single, citeable table or fact sheet, so producing a definitive, sourced year-by-year list for 2011–2016 from only these materials would risk introducing guesswork rather than documented figures [3] [4].
3. What independent trackers and ICE say more broadly about trends
Independent analyses and ICE statements provided in the search results document a long-term trend of rising ICE spending since the agency’s creation in 2003, with routine public descriptions of ICE budgets in the mid‑to‑high billions (for example, ICE has characterized its budget as “approximately $8 billion” in more recent materials) and outside analysts noting multi‑billion increases over decades [7] [8]. Those broad trend statements are consistent with the sampled year-by-year numbers available for the 2005–2010 window in TRAC’s table, but they do not substitute for precise enacted appropriations for each fiscal year in 2011–2016 without access to the specific DHS/ICE budget justifications or congressional appropriations tables for those years [1] [8] [7].
4. How to get the missing FY2011–FY2016 figures and why it matters
Authoritative year-by-year enacted-budget totals for ICE from FY2011 through FY2016 are generally published in ICE fact sheets, DHS annual budget justifications, and congressional appropriations documents; the GAO and ICE’s own annual reports and budget justifications also document supplemental inflows and transfers that alter year-end totals [5] [9] [3] [4]. Given GAO’s finding that supplemental appropriations and internal transfers meaningfully affected ICE funding levels in recent years, any comprehensive accounting for 2009–2016 should combine the enacted appropriations line with documented supplemental and transfer amounts from the DHS congressional budget justifications and GAO reporting to avoid understating or double‑counting resources [3] [4].
5. Bottom line for the record requested
From the provided reporting, the defensible, source-cited annual totals are: FY2009 — $5.928 billion (TRAC) and FY2010 — $5.741 billion (TRAC), further corroborated by ICE’s FY2010 characterization of its budget as “more than $5.7 billion” [1] [2]. The exact enacted annual totals for FY2011, FY2012, FY2013, FY2014, FY2015 and FY2016 are not present in the supplied material; the GAO warns that supplemental appropriations and transfers complicate straightforward comparisons, so definitive year-by-year figures for 2011–2016 require consulting ICE/DHS budget justifications or congressional appropriation records not included among the provided sources [3] [4].