How does ICE funding compare to other immigration enforcement agencies?
Executive summary
Ice’s budget has surged to historically large levels under recent legislation, placing it among the federal government’s top-funded law‑enforcement components and dwarfing many other agencies that touch immigration, while also reshaping how Homeland Security allocates enforcement money [1][2][3]. Compared with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and adjudicative agencies like USCIS, ICE receives the lion’s share of enforcement and detention funding, and the new multi‑year package compounds that difference by channeling tens of billions for detention and removals [4][5][6].
1. ICE’s raw budgetary scale: a runaway growth story
ICE’s appropriated and available funds in the 2025–2026 cycle balloon into the tens of billions—agency documents cite an FY2026 base request around $11.3 billion for ICE operations and positions, and legislative changes have made many billions more accessible to the agency via a broader DHS package that critics count as pushing ICE well past $25–30 billion in practice [2][3]. Independent observers and legal analysts describe an even larger figure when multiyear reconciliation funds are counted: commentators note a tranche of roughly $75 billion in the reconciliation bill available to DHS over several years, with ICE slated to receive substantial shares for detention and removals that could push annual ICE spending above $27–29 billion [3][1].
2. How ICE compares to CBP, USCIS and Justice components
By contrast, CBP is funded heavily for border operations but has been reported at lower annual levels in recent appropriations summaries—House appropriations materials list CBP funding near $19 billion for FY26 versus ICE’s roughly $11 billion appropriation line before reconciliation monies [4]. USCIS’s discretionary appropriation is tiny by comparison—Congressional documents place USCIS discretionary funding in the low hundreds of millions even as the agency relies primarily on fees [5]. Analysts and aggregators note that ICE’s spending now exceeds budgets for other major federal law‑enforcement functions taken together, including comparisons that place ICE above the FBI’s annual budget in some summaries [1][7].
3. Detention and removals: where the money is concentrated
A defining feature of ICE’s new funding profile is a dramatic expansion of detention funding: advocacy groups, policy institutes, and legal commentators report an added $11–45 billion targeted to detention and removal capacity across the multi‑year package, amounts described as a 3–4x increase in custody funding compared with 2025 levels and sufficient to support hundreds of thousands of detention bed‑years over the life of the bill [8][6][1]. That concentration distinguishes ICE from other agencies: CBP’s budget funds border posts and ports of entry, while USCIS focuses on adjudication and is not structured to absorb massive detention line items [4][5].
4. Practical consequences and interagency dynamics
Observers warn that the windfall for ICE reshapes DHS incentives: an unrestricted multi‑billion fund in the package gives DHS flexibility to steer enforcement priorities and to channel funds to contractors, state and local partners, and other DHS components, which can translate into ICE‑centric enforcement activity across agencies and jurisdictions [1][8]. The Government Accountability Office has also documented ICE’s repeated reliance on transfers and supplemental funding in recent years, signaling institutional habits of shifting dollars within DHS to meet enforcement goals—behavior that becomes consequential when ICE’s share of DHS funds swells [9].
5. Limits of public reporting and competing narratives
Public documents and policy pieces converge on the headline that ICE’s funding has grown enormously and now eclipses many other law‑enforcement budgets, but exact annual comparisons depend on whether one counts only base appropriations, fee offsets, or multi‑year reconciliation funds aggregated up front—sources differ on methodology, and some claims (for example, precise rank among global militaries or an exact FY2026 total once all multiyear funds are allocated) vary by reporter and calculation [10][3]. Reporting from the Brennan Center, Just Security, Migration Policy Institute, and agency budget justifications provides a consistent throughline—ICE’s resources have expanded far beyond recent norms and dominate the financial architecture of U.S. immigration enforcement even as methodological differences remain across sources [1][8][6][2].