Following the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003, the agency, charged with enforcing US immigration law, has enjoyed growing budgets¹ under both Democrats and Republicans.

But the budget bill passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025 is set to add $170.7 billion² to the immigrant and border-enforcement budget across several involved agencies over the next 4 years. Additional funding to ICE detention and staffing is set to increase ICE’s budget more than threefold, to an average of approximately $37.5 billion annually over the next four years.

The average annual ICE budget of $37.5 billion is

• Larger than the military expenditures of all but 15 countries in the world³

• Larger than the annual budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the U.S. Marshals Service; Drug Enforcement Agency; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Included in this explosive funding growth are totals⁴ of:

• $45 billion for new detention centers (a 265% increase) that would potentially double the agency’s capacity to detain people.

• $30 billion for personnel and operations to bring the total number of ICE agents to 30,000 (which is more than the entire staff of the FBI, and three times the number of FBI agents⁵).

The budget bill Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, increases the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years even while making massive cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP that everyday Americans rely on.⁶ The massive $170.7 billion infusion into the immigration and border enforcement budget over the next four years accounts for nearly half of that increased spending.

ICE is required to follow the US Constitution and federal law. However, when the agency was created post-9/11, it was given unique authorities and broad leeway to enforce immigration laws and support FBI counter-terrorism efforts with less transparency and fewer guardrails than other law enforcement agencies⁷.

The entities charged with overseeing ICE have been defunded, undermined, left understaffed, or led by handpicked personnel sympathetic to the mission. For its part, the majority in Congress has fully supported the expansion of ICE and failed to exercise its oversight responsibilities. Some members of Congress⁷ have sought to provide oversight–for example, by visiting El Salvador to look into the wellbeing of Kilmar Abrego, who was wrongfully sent to a prison there. Others have attempted to provide oversight of the harsh conditions of detention facilities, but have been blocked by DHS.

• Congress: The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the House Committee on Homeland Security are responsible for providing oversight over the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is part.

• DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG): Inspectors General are supposed to provide independent oversight of the agencies they are embedded in. Joseph Cuffari was appointed to this post by President Trump in his first term and has remained in this role despite calls for his removal¹¹. He was also notably spared during Trump’s purge of inspectors general¹² early in his second term.

• Government Accountability Office (GAO): The GAO is the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, but the very same budget bill that has increased ICE’s funding will also force major layoffs¹³ at the GAO.

• Office of Immigration Ombudsman & Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: President Trump has worked to eliminate¹⁴ or severely understaff¹⁵ the Office of Immigration Ombudsman and many posts¹⁶ in the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which both play a role in overseeing ICE and immigration detention centers.

• Federal courts: most immigration-related issues go before immigration judges¹⁷, administrative judges who are part of the Department of Justice. Some claims related to ICE have made their way to lower federal courts, which have issued rulings to protect basic rights from ICE, though the US Supreme Court has reversed some of those decisions.

The massive increase in scale of ICE and its growing lack of accountability to anyone other than Donald Trump’s inner circle should alarm every American. History shows us that the creation of unchecked security forces¹⁸ that answer only to those in power is often a step that authoritarians take towards suppressing dissent and entrenching themselves in power.

Experts have identified common characteristics¹⁹ of secret police forces in authoritarian regimes across the world, from Germany in the 1930s to Venezuela today. These include among others:

• Targeting political opponents and dissidents
• Answering only to their leader, with few checks on their authority
• Conducting their operations in secret
• Engaging in abusive behavior, including arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, forced disappearances and torture.²⁰

If left unchecked, ICE could be transformed into something far more dangerous than an immigration enforcement agency.