Congress Just Created America's Largest Police Force: It Can't Easily Be Undone
A $170 billion ICE surge cements a permanent detention bureaucracy with little oversight
The largest law enforcement expansion in American history just happened. Here's what it means for the future of federal power.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has just received the largest budget increase in the history of federal law enforcement. When Congress passed President Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" on July 3, 2025, the massive package sets aside about $170 billion over five years to support the Trump administration's border and immigration goals, vaulting ICE from a roughly $10 billion annual budget to approximately $40 billion annually, making it a behemoth that will fundamentally reshape American governance.
As we explain in this post, this budget initiates a structural transformation that will outlast today's politics and create institutional momentum that any future administration will struggle to reverse.
The Scale of Transformation
The $170 billion represents total funding through 2029, with ICE's annual budget increasing threefold from $10 billion to approximately $40 billion per year. This 300 percent increase is larger than the entire federal prison system's annual budget and could result in the daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.
By contrast, the Drug Enforcement Administration started with less than $75 million and today operates with a budget of $2.2 billion, making ICE's new annual budget larger than the DEA's entire 50-year operational history.
This expansion makes ICE what experts call "the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation."
What Congress Did Not Buy
Before examining what this money purchases, consider what it does not. For the price of detention construction alone, lawmakers could have:
Dramatically expanded the immigration court workforce, potentially addressing the 3.7 million-case backlog, given that the current immigration court system operates on roughly $850 million annually
Funded comprehensive asylum case-management programs in all 50 states since family case-management programs cost just $36 per day per family, compared to $152 per day per person for detention
Converted the entire immigration docket to community-based supervision and still saved billions, as Alternatives to Detention cost less than $4.20 per day per person versus $152 per day for detention
These opportunity costs never appeared in floor debate, illustrating how security politics crowd out cost-benefit analysis.
The Arithmetic of Detention
The detention spending reveals troubling priorities. Taxpayers will spend roughly $55,000 per detained person annually, while effective alternatives cost less than $1,500 per year. The budget also includes $8 billion to hire an additional 10,000 ICE employees over five years, creating a massive federal workforce with strong incentives to justify its existence through aggressive enforcement.
Centralizing Power, Bypassing Checks
ICE operates within the Department of Homeland Security, and Section 442 of the Homeland Security Act leaves operational direction largely to the President and the Secretary of Homeland Security. However, the new budget language allows for direct White House tasking of "national deportation priorities," bypassing the ordinary chain-of-command consultation. Combined with expanded 287(g) agreements that deputize local police as federal law enforcement agents, this architecture concentrates coercive power in the executive branch with minimal statutory oversight.
Economic Shockwaves Already Visible
Agriculture offers an early warning of economic disruption. The U.S. Department of Agriculture finds that 42 percent of hired crop workers lack legal status. Recent workplace raids in California have led to the disappearance of up to 70% of laborers from fields since early June, leaving produce unharvested and threatening the state's $60 billion farm economy.
The economic analysis of removing one million people annually suggests the costs will extend far beyond the federal budget, sparking supply chain disruptions and labor shortages across multiple industries.
The Bureaucratic Trap
Political scientist James Q. Wilson's research on bureaucracy reveals that government agencies often acquire constituencies with vested interests in their continued existence. ICE's new infrastructure, payroll commitments, and multi-year contracts will generate powerful defenders: construction companies, private prison operators, equipment manufacturers, and the towns that host detention facilities.
Large federal programs rarely shrink once established. ICE's budget expansion follows this pattern.
By 2030, the agency's detention infrastructure and contract obligations will make retrenchment politically and fiscally painful, even if public opinion shifts.
Implementation and Impact
Critics argue the spending priorities are misguided. Immigration advocates and fiscal conservatives have found common ground in questioning whether the most expensive enforcement tools produce the best compliance outcomes. Meanwhile, between 12 million and 17 million people are at risk of losing their healthcare under other provisions of the same bill.
Construction contracts are expected to be awarded within the next few months, with the massive detention facility expansion proceeding on an accelerated timeline to meet the administration's enforcement goals.
The New Normal
Historians studying American state formation will mark 2025 as the year immigration enforcement crossed a fiscal Rubicon. The spending rivals Cold War defense outlays, but the beneficiaries are domestic detention facilities rather than military hardware.
For voters and legislators who value limited government, the question is no longer whether ICE should grow (the agency's expansion is now law). The challenge is to establish oversight mechanisms and sunset clauses before emergency spending becomes entrenched. Congress has rewritten the rules of federal power; only Congress can revise them again.
The arithmetic is clear: America has chosen to invest more in detaining immigrants than in processing their cases, more in enforcement than in economic integration, and more in institutional expansion than in measured reform.
The bureaucratic infrastructure is rapidly taking shape, making the 2026 elections crucial for establishing oversight.
The 2026 congressional elections represent the last realistic opportunity to restructure these programs before the full infrastructure and vested interests become nearly immovable. The question now is whether democratic accountability can reshape this expansion before it becomes permanent.
This analysis examines the institutional implications of the largest law enforcement budget increase in American history. For more coverage of security spending and civil liberties, follow The Stability Brief.