ICE has only existed since 2003, and a lot of us remember a country that ran well without it. Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in November 2002, in the fear that followed September 11, and on March 1, 2003, the old Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service were dissolved, and their enforcement pieces were combined into a new agency inside a new department. It was sold to the country as counterterrorism, and ICE is what happens when an agency built in a moment of fear is handed more money and less oversight every time the country gets scared again.
For most of its life, it grew the way government agencies grow, a little more each year under presidents of both parties. In 2015, its budget was just under $6 billion, and for years after that it hovered around $10 billion.
The ramp-up came on July 4, 2025, when the current President signed a bill that gave ICE an extra $75 billion to spend over four years, on top of its regular budget, with $45 billion of that set aside for detention. That puts roughly $85 billion at the disposal of one agency, which the Brennan Center says is more than the annual budgets of every other federal law enforcement agency combined.
We have all been watching what that money bought. The Department of Homeland Security says it more than doubled ICE’s officers and agents in under a year, from 10,000 to 22,000, and it got them into the field that fast by cutting training from about six months to about six weeks. A week before this administration took office, there were 39,703 people in ICE detention, and by this past winter that number had climbed to nearly 70,000, the most the agency has ever held. The most recent count, from July, is 65,765 people, and 70.6 percent of them have no criminal conviction of any kind. In June alone, 43,138 people were booked into ICE detention.
People are dying inside. Eleven people died in ICE custody in fiscal year 2024. In the fiscal year that ended this September 30, at least 37 did, which is the most in the history of the agency and well past the old record of 28 set in 2004. The dying has not stayed inside the walls either, because in January federal immigration officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and in July ICE agents shot and killed two more people in Texas and Maine.
That brings us to this month. On October 5, a federal judge in New York, one this President appointed in 2019, issued a 28-page ruling finding that ICE agents made illegal arrests in the Bronx in May, injured a U.S. citizen, and then falsified official records to cover it up. I am a mother, and I live in a county that has been living with these raids since the summer of 2025, and I do not know how to read a sentence like that and go back to my day as if it is normal, and I do not think you do either.
If you have felt alone in that, the numbers say you are not. When this administration came in, ICE had a net approval rating of plus 16. By this July, 48 percent of Americans supported abolishing the agency outright, and 40 percent opposed it, and only 22 percent said they had a great deal of confidence in it. The country moved, and it moved because people like us kept filming, kept showing up, and kept refusing to call this normal.
So here is what we do with it. Congress wrote that check, and Congress can stop it, because the money is available through September 2029 and every seat in the House is on the ballot on November 3, so ask the people who want your vote where they stand on that funding and vote like the answer matters. Find the rapid response network in your city and join it, because every one of them needs more people who can show up, witness, and make calls. Learn the basics and teach them to your neighbors, which are that you have the right to stay silent and you do not have to open your door to an agent who does not have a warrant signed by a judge. Give what you can to the legal defense and bond funds where you live, because people in immigration court have no right to a lawyer the government pays for, and a lawyer is often the difference between coming home and disappearing into a facility three states away.
This agency is twenty-three years old, and something that was built in our lifetime can be taken apart in our lifetime, by people who decide together that they are done paying for it.
