Ice, the battle for increased funding against immigrants arrives in the Senate

The boon for the masked-faced armed guards leading Trump's anti-foreigner crusade came with the 'Big Beautiful Bill Act', the latest budget that went into effect in July. After hovering around $10 billion for years, the ICE budget rose to $170 billion in four years. Over 40 billion a year.

The fight against illegal aliens is the first priority of the tycoon's second term. And ICE agents have become the enforcement arm of his policies. The administration has set specific targets for ICE agents, including bonuses for those who catch the most illegal aliens: the goal is to deport one million people a year: 3,000 arrests a day.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (Dhs) on which ICE depends, said that the agency alone will have the capacity to hold 100 thousand people. Just to have a reference of the scale of the campaign, think that the entire US federal prison system has 155 thousand.

As of 30 November 2025, 65,735 people had ended up in ICE-run detention facilities, according to official figures. More than $15 million has also been allocated by ICE for the purchase of 45 armoured vehicles from the Canadian company Roshel for use in raids on US cities.

Ice had to hire thousands of people in just a few months. While the administration dramatically reduced the number of employees in other agencies, with thousands of redundancies, Ice's workforce grew from 10 thousand employees to the current 22 thousand. Applications in 2025 were over 220 thousand, encouraged by the high salaries and a rich incentive plan: a bonus of $50 thousand over five years for new hires, and $60 thousand in zero college debt to new graduates. The basic salary of an ICE agent ranges from $51,632 up to $84,277. This is the highest pay among security agencies, even compared to their colleagues in the FBI, who, moreover, now have a lower budget, standing at $35 billion.