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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State and local lawmakers are joining immigrant rights groups in urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would bar California law enforcement from moonlighting for ICE.

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, who represents Angelenos from South L.A. to Mar Vista, introduced AB 1537 in January. If implemented, the bill would ban California police, sheriffs and other law enforcement from taking on second jobs that involve “arresting, detaining, transporting, or deporting” people.

The bill has made its way through the state legislature and is now on the governor’s desk. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it.

At a press conference outside L.A. City Hall on Wednesday, José Madera, who directs the Pasadena Job Center, pointed to multiple deaths involving federal immigration agents in recent months — from Minneapolis to Houston — and to a recent shooting in Austin. “We don't need our local police to be part of that violence,” he said.

“ICE is a lawless, rogue agency that is terrorizing our communities, separating our families and kidnapping our neighbors,” said Bruno Huizar, supervising policy manager at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “Governor Newsom must sign AB 1537 into law to protect Californians.”

L.A. City councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, whose own parents were undocumented, said it pained him to see immigrant parents go to work and to church in fear of being separated from their children.

“If you’re a public servant, you should be serving the public — not helping ICE tear families apart,” he added in a follow-up email statement.

The bill, dubbed “No side jobs for ICE” by its proponents, would also require officers to report secondary employment offers relating to immigration to their employers.

“If a law enforcement agent gets a conditional offer from an immigration enforcement agency, that will be part of their employment records. And that will be subject to a public records act request,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, a licensed attorney at the California Immigration Policy Center. “This is aimed at bringing transparency, so that we know how many officers are actually getting offers to work as an ICE agent or a Border Patrol agent.”

The Peace Officers Research Association of California, which represents officers across the state, has spoken out against the bill, arguing that “policies like this don’t improve public safety.” The Los Angeles Police Protective League did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

The bill is part of a growing effort to bar local law enforcement from engaging in the ongoing mass deportation effort. The L.A. City Council approved a motion in March, barring city employees from holding second jobs with federal immigration enforcement agencies.

In Santa Ana, the City Council recently adopted a policy that prohibits employees from obtaining outside work that involves federal immigration enforcement activities.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill aimed at protecting children who are abused.

The law, which went into effect this week, is named “Gabriel’s Law,” after Gabriel Fernandez — an 8-year-old boy in Palmdale who died in 2013 after being tortured and abused by his mother and her boyfriend.

“It devastated the community. Still has,” said State Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale), who worked on legislation related to Gabriel’s case for years. “It hasn't gone away, right? It’s something we still acknowledge.”

Since Fernandez’s death, the Antelope Valley has seen a number of high-profile child deaths at the hands of their parents.

The new law requires social workers to make sure a child gets emergency medical care when needed, and it makes it easier to prosecute social workers who knowingly falsify records.

Officials said there had been warning signs about Fernandez’s abuse, but social workers with the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services failed to follow up on them. The high-profile case prompted internal reforms in the agency.

What happened to Gabriel

Gabriel died in May 2013, after months of abuse from his mother and her boyfriend. He was found with a number of injuries, including a fractured skull, broken ribs and BB pellets lodged in his body. His mother and her boyfriend were both sentenced.

A teacher had reported signs of abuse to the county, but social workers did not remove him from the home. Then they ended the investigation. Prosecutors charged the social workers with child abuse, but the charges were later dismissed.

“He was literally tortured. And there were many, many, many documented events, and there are many encounters that he had with people that lacked follow-up,” Lackey said.

What does the law change?

Before this week, the law said that social workers may authorize care if a child needs immediate emergency care, but did not require it. Gabriel’s law requires a social worker to secure medical care for a child.

“ They call for an ambulance or escort the child to an emergency room— make sure a physician has the opportunity to provide some level of remedy and documentation of the injury,” Lackey said.

It also clarifies the law so that social workers who are guilty of falsifying or destroying public records can be imprisoned or fined.

Why did the law take so long to change?

Lackey’s previous legislative efforts related to Fernandez’s case failed over the years. He introduced at least five different pieces of legislation that failed to advance.

“I'm not even saying that I blame the pushback and the concern, because if you're too aggressive, there's a tendency to accuse people of wrongdoing when they are not guilty of wrongdoing, so we wanted to make sure that the balance was reasonable,” he said.

Lackey terms out this year. “We're trying to do something as a community to not only pay tribute to [Gabriel], but to prevent it from reoccurring,” he said.

The Los Angeles Fire Department has completed its investigation into the cause of the Lineage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights but was unable to determine what caused it. 

In a press release, LAFD said the June 17 fire was caused by an “electrical event” that occurred on the roof of the building, “adjacent to a section of solar panels.” Despite a “comprehensive investigation,” the department could not determine what caused the electrical event.

“The Department’s thoughts remain with all those impacted by this deeply tragic incident,” Arson and Fire Investigation Chief Thomas Raymond said in a release.

In response to the inconclusive investigation, District 14 Councilmember Ysabel Jurado said, “LAFD’s finding that the cause remains undetermined does nothing to alleviate what Boyle Heights residents have endured and are still carrying: months of health concerns and disruption, along with unanswered questions about whether this site can safely operate again.”

“The fact that we still cannot explain how this catastrophe began is yet another reason I will continue opposing any permits to rebuild this facility,” Jurado said.

Recently, the LA City Council voted to withhold rebuilding permits for the Lineage warehouse until after the Los Angeles Fire Department completed its investigation. Earlier this month, Lineage Chief Executive Officer Greg Lehmkuhl told Boyle Heights Beat and The LA Local that the company had not decided whether to rebuild, saying, “We’re still focused on holding the right people accountable here and making sure that we’re continuing to support the community.”

The CEO’s comments came after Lineage sued solar power provider Altus Power, Inc. and its contractor, blaming them for the fire. Altus Power and its contractor dispute those claims.

In a statement following the completed investigation, Lineage said, “Today’s report from the Los Angeles Fire Department validates what we have known all along: This was a solar fire.”

The fire and subsequent cleanup of millions of pounds of rotting food caused a flood of issues for residents living in Boyle Heights, East LA and surrounding communities, including an infestation of flies and pests, nausea and headaches, higher utility bills and other health concerns. 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Boyle Heights Beat senior reporter Alejandra Molina and LA Local reporter Christopher Damien contributed to this report.

The post LAFD closes investigation into Lineage warehouse fire without determining a cause appeared first on LA Local.