As news of immigration raids permeate Americans’ social media feeds, news broadcasts and neighborhood meetings, critics of President Donald Trump’s tactics are warning his federal immigration force is gaining unprecedented strength.
Trump’s tax and spending law awards U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with detaining and deporting people in the U.S. illegally, billions of dollars over the next four years.
“ICE will now become the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency, bigger than the FBI, bigger than the DEA,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau said on the July 8 Pod Save America podcast he co-hosts.
Other left leaning groups and people have made similar statements, including Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU school of law and Aaron Reichlin-Melnicksenior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy group.
The new law clearly includes an enormous increase in spending for ICE, but does it make ICE the “largest” federal law enforcement agency? Favreau didn’t explain his metric for “largest” on the show, but he mentioned that the new law includes money to hire 10,000 ICE employees and build immigration detention beds.
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We examined how ICE compares with the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in terms of funding and staffing. Favreau is right about the DEA. As to the FBI, we found that Favreau’s statement tracks based on some calculations about spending in the new law and ICE’s likely annual budget. But it is less certain when comparing ICE and FBI staffing numbers.
Here’s a wrinkle in these comparisons: We don’t yet know the future years’ annual base budget for ICE or the FBI. Congress will set the fiscal 2026 base budgets by Sept. 30.
How ICE compares to the FBI in size is significant because it shows how federal officials are prioritizing the nation’s enforcement needs. The FBI investigates a broad range of crimes including terrorism, cyber crimes, violent and white collar crime and although some of those offenders could be immigrants, it includes a lot of crime committed by U.S. citizens.
Several emails to Crooked Media, home of Pod Save America, did not get a response.
ICE’s new funding makes its overall budget appear larger that FBI’s
ICE is one of nine agencies within the Department of Homeland Security — and it’s worth noting that DHS itself touts on its website that all agencies combined make DHS “the largest federal law enforcement agency with approximately 80,000 officers across nine agencies and offices.”
The law Trump signed provides about $165 billion for Homeland Security, including $46.5 billion to finish building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Its ICE-specific budgetary provisions add up to about $75 billion over four years.
The FBI and the DEA are part of the Justice Department. The DEA has a budget of about $2.6 billion and employs about 10,000 people throughout the world, making it easily smaller than both the FBI and ICE, no matter how you look at it.
Reichlin-Melnick told us he based his own ICE comparisons on funding.
“I’ve been saying that ICE will become the nation’s highest-funded federal law enforcement agency, with a budget larger than the combined budget of the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote to PolitiFact.
Of the $75 billion going to ICE through September 2029, $45 billion is for 80,000 new detention beds. The remaining $30 billion will go toward hiring 10,000 new employees, removal operations and facility and information technology upgrades.
That works out to about $17.7 billion more per year through September 2029, bringing the total annual budget to about $27.7 billion. (ICE’s current annual budget is about $10 billion.)
That total amount for ICE adds up to more than the current annual budgets of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies including the Bureau of Prisons, according to the Justice Department.
Staffing comparison is more murky
If you look at the three agencies by staffing, the comparison is less certain.
As of April, the FBI had about 38,000 employees, 13,000 of whom are special agents authorized to make arrests.
ICE has about 20,000 employees, including 6,100 deportation officers and 6,500 special agents authorized to make arrests. Under the new law, ICE’s force will grow to 30,000 within four years — 10,000 of them officers, agents, investigators and support staff.
So although the FBI overall is larger than ICE now, ICE could surpass the FBI in the number of agents with authority to make arrests, depending on how hiring breaks down for the new 10,000 positions.
Agencies’ base budgets are not yet set
One caveat: ICE’s future annual budgets are unclear because the administration could spend the $75 billion sooner rather than later — meaning, not in equal measure across the four years, Migration Policy Institute spokesperson Michelle Mittelstadt said.
“Also, Congress is currently working on (fiscal year) 2026 appropriations, so they could change ICE’s annual budget then, too,” Mittelstadt said.
The new law that Trump signed includes extra funding for ICE; it does not mention the annual base budget for ICE or the FBI for the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.
Trump proposed that Congress provide $11.3 billion for ICE, an increase over its current $10 billion. The FBI’s budget request is $10.1 billion; a reduction of $545 million and of at least 1,500 positions, including about 700 that are vacant, according to a June Justice Department budget and performance summary.
ICE’s expanded work will also involve outside contractors, other agencies
Other experts on ICE or the federal budget noted additional caveats.
John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE during part of Obama’s administration, told PolitiFact that more than one-third of ICE’s detention beds are operated by private prison companies.
“If you consider the guards and other facility personnel (most of whom technically work for the detention provider) as ICE employees, the agency is likely to be larger than the FBI,” Sandweg said.
The Trump administration has also allowed federal officials in other agenciessuch as the DEA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service to enforce immigration law.
ICE has hundreds of agreements delegating some immigration authorities to state and local police.
“None of those would be counted as personnel in the ICE budget justification, but it would vastly increase the number of law enforcement personnel acting on behalf of ICE,” said Joshua Sewell, Taxpayers for Common Sense director of research and policy.
An example: Florida cooperates with ICE and in July opened Alligator Alcatraz, an immigration detention facility. The state will incur the upfront costs and seek reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program.
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Our ruling
Favreau said, “ICE will now become the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency, bigger than the FBI, bigger than the DEA.”
He’s right about ICE being bigger than DEA.
And ICE becomes the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency under Trump’s law compared with the FBI’s existing budget. But there are some unknowns: We don’t know if the $75 billion newly allocated to ICE will be spent evenly over four years or as a huge infusion in the first year, making the annual budget comparison tricky. We also don’t know what will happen with the FBI’s annual budget over the next four years.
If the new ICE funds are allocated evenly over four years and based on current budget levels, that adds up to $27.7 billion annually for ICE, more than the FBI’s annual budget of about $10 billion and DEA’s $2.6 billion.
As to agency staffing, the FBI’s 38,000 workforce is greater than ICE’s 20,000 plus the expected 10,000 new hires. But ICE could surpass the FBI in the number of agents with authority to make arrests, depending on how the new hires shake out.
The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True.
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