What is the current ICE budget for 2024?
Executive summary
The federal agency responsible for immigration enforcement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), operated in fiscal year 2024 on a budget in the neighborhood of $9–10 billion, although the Department of Homeland Security’s FY2024 request lists a lower figure of $8.7 billion and different analyses report slightly different enacted totals depending on whether numbers are adjusted for inflation or reported at different points in the appropriations process [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What DHS requested vs. what Congress moved — two different reference points
The Department of Homeland Security’s FY2024 budget justification explicitly lists a FY2024 ICE figure of $8.7 billion, along with staffing levels of roughly 22,175 positions and 22,007 full-time equivalents for the agency, which represents the administration’s requested funding to carry out ICE’s missions [1]. By contrast, congressional appropriations documents and watchdog groups reference slightly higher enacted or proposed appropriations in committee and reconciliation actions, reflecting how the request and the final congressional figures diverged during the budget process [2] [4].
2. Congressional and watchdog tallies cluster around $9–10 billion
Senate Appropriations summaries for the Homeland Security bill cite a topline figure of $9.6 billion for ICE in the FY2024 package, an increase above the administration’s request documented in that committee paper [2]. Advocacy groups and budget analysts report a range of enacted and effective spending levels: the National Immigrant Justice Center noted that Congress appropriated over $9.1 billion to ICE for FY2024 [4], while USAFacts’ spending series — adjusted for inflation — lists ICE federal spending at $9.99 billion in 2024 [3]. These variations reflect differences in accounting (requested vs. enacted, nominal vs. inflation-adjusted) and the granular breakdown of ICE program lines.
3. Program-level context: detention, enforcement and internal variance
Breaking out ICE’s internal budgets shows further divergence: detention funding and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) are often tracked separately and saw specific increases in recent years; for example, reporting notes ICE’s 2024 detention budget as roughly $3.4 billion and ERO budget at about $5.1 billion, figures used by watchdogs to show how much of ICE’s resources go to detention and removals [5]. Those program-level figures help explain why advocates and critics focus on differing totals: a relatively modest agencywide number can conceal large, targeted investments in detention capacity, transportation, and enforcement operations that shaped policy debates in 2024 and beyond [5] [6].
4. Why some outlets later report dramatically larger sums for 2025 and beyond
Several organizations flag that subsequent legislation — notably a multi-year reconciliation package discussed in 2025 coverage — injected tens of billions more into DHS and ICE capacities, producing headlines about ICE having $28–30 billion available in 2025 or large multiyear authorizations that dramatically outsize FY2024 levels [7] [8] [9]. Those later figures are not FY2024 baseline appropriations; they reflect new, multi-year funds or statutory scorekeeping conventions that treat multi-year allocations as available in the first year for certain accounting purposes, which can make year-to-year comparisons misleading unless the reader tracks whether a number is a single-year enacted appropriation, an agency request, or a multiyear authorization [7] [10].
5. Bottom line and limits of available reporting
In short, the most defensible reading of available public documents and analyses places ICE’s FY2024 budget in the roughly $8.7 billion (DHS request) to $10 billion (inflation-adjusted or committee-reported totals) band, with commonly cited enacted figures clustered around $9.1–9.6 billion and program-level line items such as detention and ERO drawing significant portions of that funding [1] [2] [3] [4]. Reporting beyond FY2024 frequently references large new appropriations or multiyear funds that greatly expand ICE’s resources for 2025 and later, but those are separate from the agency’s baseline FY2024 budget and thus should not be conflated with the 2024 total without careful qualification [7] [8] [9].