The Brief

Just 10 years ago, the annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was less than $6 billion — 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 $85 billion now at its disposal.

The windfall is thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 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 and thrusting them into unmarked vehicles to the recent killing of Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis.

A cycle of more migrants, more money and a larger ICE mission

ICE'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 was nearly $1 billion less than then-President Barack Obama had requested.

In 2019, during the first Trump administration, border control officer's encounters with migrants attempting authorized entry to the U.S. spiked. Those numbers then plummeted as the COVID-19 pandemic prompted invocation of the Title 42 public health law, allowing CBP to expel migrants more quickly, with restricted pathways to asylum.

Encounters rose sharply under former President Joe Biden and soared above 3.2 million in 2023, when Biden lifted Title 42. By late 2024, fewer migrants were arriving at the border, due to U.S. asylum limits and Mexico bolstering enforcement.

When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he sought to empower immigration authorities to quickly remove migrants and announced a crackdown led by ICE.

Under 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.

To give that large number a sense of scale, consider that the Trump administration's 2026 appropriations request for the entire Justice Department, including the FBI, stands at a little over $35 billion.

The Trump administration has set lofty goals for ICE, aiming to deport 1 million people each year. 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. By comparison, the federal Bureau of Prisons currently holds over 153,000 inmates.

As of Nov. 30, 65,735 people were held in immigration detention, according to the data tracking project Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

With those metrics in mind, ICE went on a hiring spree in 2025, fueled by its bigger budget. In just one year, the agency says, it "more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000." (The Office of Personnel Management, which tracks federal workforce statistics, is only updated through Nov. 30 and does not reflect any hiring made by the DHS in the last quarter of the year.)

According to the DHS, ICE received 220,000 applications in 2025, thanks in part to a generous incentive package with perks like a signing bonus of up to $50,000, disbursed over the course of a five-year commitment, and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment.

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 the USA Jobs website that 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.

The dramatic growth came in the same year that the Trump administration sharply reduced the number of federal workers, firing thousands of employees and inviting many more to resign.

What else will the new funds be spent on? 

With base level funding for DHS and ICE due to expire at the end of January, Democrats in Congress are calling for changes to how ICE operates. It comes after a year in which deaths of people in ICE custody spiked to the highest levels in decades, with ICE reporting seven deaths in December, and three more in 2026, as of Jan. 16.

ICE'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 stripped legal status from 1.6 million immigrants in 2025.

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."
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Two years after a wave of public benefit thefts that left low-income Californians scrambling to pay rent and afford food each month, Gov. Gavin Newsom is touting a significant decline in the reported amount stolen.

The thefts still amounted to more than $4 million a month last fall in both the CalFresh food assistance and CalWorks cash welfare benefits programs, according to a press release from Newsom’s office. That’s down from two years ago, when public benefits recipients were reporting $20 million a month stolen from their accounts. The state uses taxpayer money to reimburse victims when they report theft.

Newsom credited the reduction to the state’s rollout of anti-fraud technology such as more secure electronic benefit (EBT) cards with electronic chips.

“In California, we’re leading the way by turning innovation into action by stopping theft and ensuring benefits reach those who truly need them,” he said in a press release.

Newsom’s office announced the improved theft numbers last week after the Trump administration ramped up threats to California over allegations of fraud in public benefits. The president has used a wave of prosecutions over social services fraud in Minnesota, some of it allegedly by immigrants, as a reason to send immigration agents to conduct aggressive raids in Minneapolis.

Earlier this month the Trump administration froze some federal social services funding to five Democratic-led states, including California. A judge halted the freeze, which included funds for the CalWorks cash aid program, for now.

The kind of fraud in which Newsom was touting reductions is not traditional “welfare fraud” perpetrated by recipients of public benefits, but rather theft by a third party. Local social services officials have said fraud by recipients is relatively uncommon.

Thieves have been taking advantage of California benefits recipients by using hidden “skimming” devices to steal card numbers from EBT cards loaded withCalFresh food assistance and CalWorks cash welfare benefits. They then duplicate the cards and drain them of cash or make large purchases using CalFresh, before the recipients have a chance to spend their own benefits.

California was particularly susceptible because of the size of the state’s social safety net, with roughly 300,000 families receiving cash aid and 3 million receiving food assistance. CalMatters reported in 2023 that the state, previously focused on detecting fraud committed by recipients of the benefits, had also ignored warnings and delayed a proposal to introduce chipped EBT cards.

When the pandemic brought new benefits from the federal and state governments, such as boosted unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, thieves wielding card skimmers followed the money. EBT cards, which contained only a magnetic strip at the time, were among the most vulnerable to theft. Nearly 200 people have been charged across California in the EBT schemes, Newsom's office said.

Since 2023 the state responded to the skimming crisis by issuing chipped EBT cards and introducing an app allowing recipients to freeze their EBT accounts to prevent withdrawals. Last year, Newsom said, the state began using a computer model to detect fraudulent withdrawals and forced resets of some CalWorks’ recipients EBT card PINs.

But local welfare fraud investigators said the Newsom’s numbers paint too rosy a picture of the theft.

Gregory Mahony, president of the California Welfare Fraud Investigators Association, said he believes the state’s reported thefts are undercounted.

The figures are based on how much the state reimburses county welfare departments each month to return victims’ benefits. But some recipients don’t bother making a report, or report months of thefts but only get some of the money reimbursed, Mahony said.

He also criticized the California Department of Social Services for dropping a requirement in 2023 that victims file police reports each time their benefits are stolen in order to get a reimbursement. That’s hurt the state’s tracking of theft and fraud, Mahony said.

“This is not a systemic victory,” he said in a statement. “It is a delayed and partial mitigation of a crisis long allowed to grow unchecked.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he is seeking immediate negotiations for the ownership of Greenland but he would not "use force."

"We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won't do that," he said during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"That's probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force, but I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force," he said.

Trump said U.S. ownership of Greenland is necessary for national security and that "who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or release, which is a large piece of ice in the middle of the ocean."

"So we want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won't give it. We've never asked for anything else, and we could have kept that piece of land, and we didn't. So they have a choice. You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember," Trump said.

Trump's push to acquire Greenland

Just two weeks ago, Trump posted on social media that he'd address affordability when he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

But his belligerent foreign policy is once again overshadowing his attempts at a cohesive economic message. Trump's aggressive push to acquire Greenland has turned to open antagonism toward allies in recent days, becoming a central focus of this year's forum.

Just days before the forum began, Trump on social media threatened to tariff goods from eight European nations and NATO members until they support a U.S. deal to purchase Greenland.

Those countries responded with a statement saying that they stand in solidarity with Denmark and Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Over the weekend, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr also revealed a text conversation in which Trump said that not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — which the Norwegian government does not confer — is influencing his decision to pursue Greenland.

It also became clear in recent days that other world leaders were seeking to dissuade Trump from attempting to take over Greenland, when Trump on Monday night posted screenshots of text messages from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Rutte began his message with flattery, praising Trump's recent strikes in Syria. Rutte added, "I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland."

Macron, for his part, was harsher: "I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland," he wrote, but added that he wanted to have dinner after Davos.

And Trump on Tuesday reposted a social media message that cast the U.N. and NATO as the "real threat" to the U.S., as opposed to China and Russia.

All of this buildup has brought American foreign policy to center stage at Davos. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the stage with Fox Business's Maria Bartiromo yesterday, her first question was about Greenland: "How do you justify taking over a country when in fact Denmark and Greenland have said they're not interested?"

"Greenland's becoming more and more attractive for foreign conquest, and he very strongly believes that it must be part of the U.S. to prevent a conflict," Bessent said as part of his answer.

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday delivered a forceful speech that, without mentioning Trump explicitly, argued that his policies are leading to the breakdown of the international order.

"Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition," Carney said. "Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited."

"We stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future. Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering," he later added. "Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland."

But Trump, speaking at length with reporters Tuesday, seemed to step off the gas slightly when it came to his harsh rhetoric. Asked about how his push for Greenland could result in breaking up NATO, Trump seemed to demur.

"Something's going to happen that's going to be very good for everybody," he said.

The foreign policy Trump is bringing to Davos goes beyond Greenland. On Thursday, he will participate in what the White House is calling a Board of Peace Charter Announcement.

The "Board of Peace" is being created as part of Trump's 20-point plan to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas and has come under sharp criticism. A copy of the charter obtained by NPR said that countries that want permanent membership will have to pay $1 billion, and that Trump is the permanent chair, even after his term as U.S. president ends. The charter also says that the world needs a more effective international peace-building body — which may signal the board is hoping to act as a rival to the U.N.

The board's membership is still unsettled, but Trump said he has asked Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, to take part. Meanwhile, France's Macron has said he will not join.

Trump told reporters this week that his main message in Davos will be "how well the United States is doing." Economic advisor Kevin Hassett has said the president will also be revealing a new housing policy.

Copyright 2026 NPR