Imagine for a second where a single U.S. government agency increasingly get more operational fund to spend, so much than the entire military budget of almost every country on Earth.
This is new reality for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, notoriously know as ICE, today. Following a major bill passed in July 2025, their budget didn’t just grow, it skyrocketed from about $10 billion to a massive $75 billion over four years.
To put that in perspective, ICE is the agency that is behind the deportation trend of the emigrants. They are saddled with arrest, detain and deportation of individual in united States.
This agency now has a “bigger budget than 170 militaries” and even more funding than the traditional FBI. So, where is all that money actually going?
A huge chunk of it, warming upto $45 billion, to be exact—is being poured into detention. That is a “400% surge since 2025” in spending just to hold people. A nightmare for the victims which has turned an enterprise – a detention enterprise.
This has created a goldmine for private prison companies like the GEO Group and CoreCivic. Interestingly, many of these companies are run by people who used to be high-ranking officials at ICE. It’s a tight circle where the business of “surveillance through GPS ankle bracelets and smartphone apps” has become incredibly profitable.
The logistics of moving people are just as pricey. Cost of every deportees is another point of focus. Every single person on a deportation flight costs the taxpayer over $4,500, and those flights have increased by 62%.
With $30 billion set aside for field operations and another $10 billion in “just-in-case” funds, the goal is to hit 3,000 arrests every single day and 1 million per year. A new target instructed by President Donald Trump of the United States.
When you step back, the numbers are hard to wrap your head around.
Meanwhile, that same $75 billion could have paid for full Medicaid coverage for 2 million Americans for those same four years.
It’s a massive shift in where the country chooses to put its resources.
