Big, beautiful bill: Supercharging ICE

There's little to stop Trump from turning a supercharged ICE into "his de facto private army."

(Image credit: Carlin Steihl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

published 15 July 2025

President Trump is "ushering in America's ICE age," said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. The "big, beautiful bill" he signed into law last week will pump an extra $170 billion toward his mass deportation and border security agenda, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement getting the biggest boost. ICE will receive an extra $75 billion over the next four years, making its annual budget larger than that of most other law enforcement agencies combined—including the FBI, DEA, and Bureau of Prisons—and "higher than Italy's entire defense budget." With that gush of funding, ICE will be able to expand its force of agents from 6,000 to 16,000, and build a nationwide network of detention camps to hold 116,000 deportees, more than double the number of beds it has today. And because the agency's in-house watchdog has been scrapped and the Supreme Court has granted the president sweeping immunity for "official" acts, there's little to stop Trump from turning a supercharged ICE into "his de facto private army."

"What might these new investments mean in practice?" asked Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post. To meet the administration's daily quota of 3,000 migrant arrests, ICE agents are already filling detention centers "not with criminals and gangbangers, but people with no criminal history whatsoever." The number of ICE detainees with "zero criminal convictions or charges is up nearly 14-fold" since Trump returned to office. Putting more ICE agents on the streets will result in even more "gardeners, home health aides, grad students, nannies, and construction workers" being seized. Local and state officers could also join in the frenzy, said Hayes Brown in MSNBC.com. The law allocates $3.5 billion to compensate states that detain migrants, and given how eagerly police departments and sheriffs' offices compete for federal funding, "it's likely that many will leap at the chance to share in this bonanza."

Ordinary Americans won't be safe from "an ICE force on steroids," said Patricia Lopez in Bloomberg. At least 674 U.S. citizens were arrested by the agency between 2015 and 2020, according to a government report, and an unknown number have been detained this year. Heidi Plummer, an attorney in Orange County, California, was strolling through a park last month when she happened upon an ICE raid and was handcuffed by agents. "I was in utter shock that this could happen to any U.S. citizen," said Plummer, who was held until she could prove her identity. Her story is yet more proof that Trump's crackdown has "gone too far—and now he has the funds to take it even further."