ICE's big payday makes mass deportation possible

Mint

08-07-2025

For more than a month Los Angeles has been subject to countless immigration raids. Certain places are regular targets: car washes, Home Depots, bus stops, street markets. One video taken in the Ladera Heights neighbourhood shows federal agents pinning Celina Ramirez to a tree. They are wearing bullet-proof vests, masks, hats and sunglasses to hide their faces, and guns strapped to their sides. Ms Ramirez had been selling tacos near a Home Depot. The agents shove her into a van, deploy tear gas at onlookers who were recording the encounter, and race off. She was probably taken to the basement of the federal detention centre, where troops are still stationed outside.
The raids in LA are a prelude to an era of increased immigration enforcement. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB), signed by President Donald Trump on July 4th, will pour roughly $170bn into strengthening border security and ramping up deportations. The biggest beneficiary is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which will receive nearly $75bn over four years for everything from new detention facilities to more agents and better technology. That is more money than the annual budgets for nine federal law-enforcement agencies combined (see chart). Mr Trump's deportation demands and the BBB funding will allow ICE to become the best-resourced, most aggressive version of itself. In an interview with The Economist, Tom Homan, Mr Trump's border czar, calls it 'a game-changer'. Carrying out 1m deportations a year has never looked so achievable.
But David Bier of the Cato Institute, a think-tank, reckons that the immigration provisions in the bill will cost $1trn more than the Congressional Budget Office suggests, owing to the need to continue to pay all those new agents and maintain the bigger border wall beyond 2029. Deporting immigrants who paid more in taxes than they received in benefits only adds to the cost. 'This is war-like levels of funding,' he says.
Congress's inability or unwillingness to reform America's broken immigration system has meant that its enforcement arm has grown—becoming more visible and more militarised. 'ICE has emerged as one of our main forces for regulating the mobility of people in the developing world,' says Austin Kocher of Syracuse University. How did that happen? For 70 years the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) handled everything from visa processing and asylum to deportations. Doris Meissner, who led the INS under Bill Clinton, reckons that there are two moments integral to understanding what ICE has become. The first was the passage of an immigration law in 1996 that expanded the list of crimes that made someone deportable and created mandatory detention for certain migrants. The agency came to depend on private prisons. Ms Meissner wrote a memo outlining which migrants the INS would pursue (criminals), and which might be left alone (veterans).
The second moment Ms Meissner points to is the break-up of the INS after 9/11, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE within it. America increasingly viewed immigration through a national-security lens, rather than a civilian law-enforcement one. ICE's initial struggles were between its immigration and customs officials, who competed for top jobs and prestige. But as illegal border crossings increased in the mid-2000s the agency became synonymous with its immigration mission. ICE, like the INS before it, was 'la migra'.
The shift increased tensions within the agency, specifically between ICE's enforcement division (ERO) and its investigative one (HSI), which delves into weapons smuggling and human trafficking. HSI agents see themselves as detectives, notes one former DHS official, and ERO as jailers. ICE officials blame Congress's inaction for its unpopularity. But the American left increasingly viewed the agency itself as toxic. During Mr Trump's first term 'abolish ICE' became a rallying cry for progressives, and the question of whether to restructure the agency was a litmus test in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. But when illegal border crossings surged and it became clear that this was in fact a problem, the slogan looked wildly out of touch.
The BBB's passage marks another transformative moment for the agency. 'This funding is going to give us thousands more beds, which means we arrest thousands more people,' says Mr Homan, who led ICE during part of Mr Trump's first term. Arrests are already climbing. Stephen Miller, the president's deputy chief of staff and the architect of his immigration policy, wants ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day. In early June the agency was averaging roughly 1,100, according to the Deportation Data Project, a group that collects immigration statistics (see chart). Mr Homan and DHS insist that the administration is prioritising criminals and national-security threats. But the pressure to ramp up arrests is leading to indiscriminate round-ups of day labourers and taco-sellers. An analysis of the Deportation Data Project's figures by Mr Bier suggests that nearly half of the migrants arrested during the first week of June had no criminal record.
During Mr Trump's first term, he binned the kind of enforcement priorities that Ms Meissner had first put in place back in the 1990s. But ICE didn't have the resources to go after both criminals and farmworkers, so deportations remained relatively low. The BBB allows ICE to work on finding gang members while also going after grandmas who came to America from Mexico decades ago.
When Mr Trump took office, there was a long list of obstacles that made mass deportations unlikely. There weren't enough ICE agents, detention beds or airplanes to arrest people, then house and return them. The courts moved slowly and had a tremendous backlog. Some countries didn't want to take back their citizens. BBB helps with the logistical problems. Stripping migrants of the temporary legal status conferred by the Biden administration makes the pool of potential deportees larger. And closing court cases and sending people to places they did not come from sidesteps the legal and diplomatic roadblocks.
Do any barriers remain? Sanctuary states and cities are still blocking ICE from accessing jails and prisons, the easiest places to pick up undocumented migrants who have committed crimes. 'We don't have that problem in Florida because Governor [Ron] DeSantis has passed a law that sheriffs must work with us,' explains Mr Homan. 'So we'll take those available resources from Florida and we'll put them in New York and other sanctuary cities.' Mr Homan suggests that allowing ICE access to jails means fewer agents on the streets, but also promises that no one is 'off the table'.
It will also take time for ICE to recruit and train up new agents. 'Mass hiring is like mass deportation,' says Bo Cooper, a former general counsel for the INS. 'It's easier said than done.' Several former ICE and DHS officials reckon it could take anywhere from a few months to up to two years to get more agents on patrol. Mr Homan is making contingency plans. The BBB includes funding to help train local law enforcement agencies to work with ICE, supplementing its staffing levels. Mr Homan also wants to hire contractors to do paperwork, freeing up employees with 'badges and guns' to pound the pavement.
As ICE arrives in more communities, the agency will become more controversial. A majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, but they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children or who arrived many years ago to stay. The agency has already lost support since the beginning of Mr Trump's term: 42% of Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov viewed ICE favourably in mid-June, an eight percentage-point drop from February (see chart). Meanwhile, support among Republicans increased by nine points.
Mr Homan, former ICE officials, pro-immigrant activists and academics all warn that the risk of violence will increase. Mr Homan blames protesters. 'I'm afraid someone is going to get hurt,' he says, if 'an officer feels his life is in danger, he may have to use deadly force'. He takes no responsibility, however, for the administration's fiery rhetoric (last month Mr Homan warned the governor of California that he could be arrested). Protesters blame ICE. At a recent rally at a Home Depot on the south side of LA, one protester declared that 'the raids are going to stop when we kick their asses out of Los Angeles.' Rushing new agents through training won't help; past hiring surges within the Border Patrol have coincided with more allegations of excessive force.
ICE agents themselves are not all happy warriors. One former ICE official argues that working for the agency means angering half of the country all of the time. At headquarters, DHS leaders force employees to take polygraph tests if they are suspected of leaking to the media. Several career bureaucrats worry that the laser focus on immigration enforcement is detracting from counterterrorism, drug-smuggling or child-pornography investigations. Some are retiring early. 'It's very funereal most days,' says one former DHS official. 'I think what's happening at the department is making America less safe.'