Immigration and Customs Enforcement has never been more powerful, or more polarizing, than it is at the start of 2026, leaving the future of ICE at the center of a fierce fight over what interior immigration enforcement should look like in the United States. Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, the agency has been “supercharged” with unprecedented funding and authority, even as think tanks, civil‑rights groups and some Democrats debate whether it should be fundamentally reined in, restructured or, in the most radical proposals, abolished.
A “supercharged” ICE: budget and mandate
When ICE was created in 2003, its mandate was to enforce immigration laws away from the border and investigate transnational crimes, with a budget that hovered around 10 billion dollars in recent years. That baseline has been transformed by Trump’s return to the White House and the passage in July 2025 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), an enormous enforcement‑focused spending package.
OBBBA sets aside roughly 170 billion dollars for immigration enforcement and border security over four years, including about 45 billion dollars for ICE to expand detention capacity and around 30 billion to hire up to 10,000 additional enforcement officers. NPR calculates that with a 75‑billion‑dollar supplemental and its usual appropriations, ICE could effectively have close to 29 billion dollars a year to spend, tripling its budget and making it the highest‑funded US law‑enforcement agency, with resources approaching those of some foreign militaries.
The White House says this expansion is necessary to meet aggressive removal goals and to “restore operational control of the southern border” by bringing border‑style enforcement into the interior. The administration’s own figures claim more than 605,000 people have been deported since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, with an additional 1.9 million “self‑deporting,” and officials have spoken openly of targeting 1 million deportations a year.
To do that, Trump’s team has widened the remit of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), declared an emergency at the southern border, expanded expedited removals that allow deportations without immigration‑court hearings, and launched mass deportation campaigns involving hundreds of removal flights. Homeland Security task forces now operate in all 50 states, blending ICE personnel with agents from the FBI, DEA and ATF, diverting resources from other missions such as counterterrorism, according to critics.
Expansion outpacing accountability
The new money and mandates have triggered a parallel debate over abuses and oversight. A January 2026 Brookings analysis argues that ICE’s expansion “has outpaced accountability,” pointing to deadly encounters, allegations of retaliation against activists and a detention system that has grown more sprawling and opaquer.
The report notes that ICE has deported roughly 540,000 people since Trump’s second inauguration, and highlights incidents in which officers allegedly used excessive force or failed to render aid, cases that have prompted lawsuits and judicial pushback. In one example, a Minnesota federal judge restricted ICE’s use of retaliatory arrests against peaceful protesters, underscoring judicial unease with some tactics.
Civil‑rights groups and the American Immigration Council warn that OBBBA’s 45‑billion‑dollar detention build‑out is driving an “expanding and increasingly carceral” system, with more than 65,000 people held in ICE custody on a given day in late 2025 and ambitions to detain up to 100,000 daily. They argue that such scale amplifies longstanding problems, poor medical care, prolonged confinement, limited access to counsel, at a time when Congress has actually capped the number of immigration judges at 800, despite a backlog of nearly 3.8 million cases.
In response to public outrage over specific deaths and abuses, lawmakers have begun to float targeted guardrails: a draft DHS spending bill would require the department to spend 20 million dollars on body cameras for immigration enforcement agents and expand training on conflict de‑escalation, while some legislators are pushing to end provisional hiring without full background checks and mandate first aid when force is used.
Abolish ICE” vs. “Reform and retrain”
On the political left, ICE’s transformation has revived calls to abolish the agency outright. Progressive lawmakers such as Representative Mark Pocan argue that ICE has become a “rogue agency” functioning with near‑impunity, detaining US citizens in errors, engaging in racial profiling during raids and operating “like a force of power” rather than a normal law‑enforcement body. They contend that decades of mission creep and rights violations justify dismantling the agency and rebuilding interior enforcement from scratch.
But a growing chorus of centrist Democrats and policy groups warns that “Abolish ICE” is both substantively and politically risky. A memo this month from the Democratic‑aligned think tank Third Way calls the slogan “emotionally satisfying but dangerous,” arguing that advocating abolition is tantamount to endorsing a halt to all interior immigration enforcement a position at odds with public opinion and likely to hand Republicans an easy attack line.
Instead, Third Way and others propose a “Reform and Retrain” approach that would:
- Narrow ICE’s mission to focus on serious public‑safety and national‑security threats.
- Create outside oversight bodies to review use‑of‑force policies and incidents and compensate victims.
- Tighten hiring and training standards, with recurring de‑escalation and civil‑rights training.
- Increase transparency around detention and deportation data.
Brookings scholars similarly recommend scaling back ICE’s footprint, reinforcing due‑process protections and removing absolute immunity for agents in misconduct cases, while insisting that some interior enforcement capacity will remain necessary in any realistic immigration system.
How Trump is reshaping the agency’s future
For now, however, the trajectory of ICE is being set not by reformers but by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress.
Compared with Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who formally prioritized removals of people with serious criminal records, recent unauthorized entrants, or perceived security threats, Trump has again broadened the target list to include virtually all 11 million undocumented people in the country. Legal experts quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations say the administration is testing the limits of presidential power by invoking obscure statutes, expanding expedited removals deep into the interior and stretching the use of emergency declarations.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s design also hints at how long Trump aims to embed his enforcement vision. By pouring money into detention beds, walls, and ICE personnel rather than courts and legal aid, the law bakes in a preference for fast removal over adjudicated status, a tilt that could shape enforcement patterns even under a future Democratic administration.
A PBS investigation recently likened OBBBA to a “militarization” of immigration enforcement, with one budget analyst noting that such levels of spending are usually reserved for the Pentagon. ICE’s expanded use of task forces that pull in FBI, DEA and ATF agents effectively repurposes parts of the federal government around a deportation agenda.
Possible futures: three scenarios
Analysts and advocates sketch at least three plausible paths for ICE over the next decade.
1. The entrenched enforcement state
If current policies persist and Republicans maintain control in Washington, ICE could solidify as a semi‑permanent, high‑capacity enforcement machine: detaining up to 100,000 people daily, carrying out hundreds of thousands of expedited removals each year and playing a central role in domestic policing through multi‑agency task forces.
Under this scenario, reforms are minimal and focused on optics body cameras, some training, while the core model of mass interior enforcement remains intact. Civil‑rights groups warn this would normalize mass deportation and deepen fear in immigrant communities, with knock‑on effects for labor markets, civic participation, and US soft power.
2. Reform and retrenchment
A second scenario, favored by centrist Democrats and some policy institutes, would keep an interior enforcement agency but narrow its mission and boost oversight.
A future administration could:
- Rewrite ICE’s priorities to focus on people convicted of serious crimes and genuine security threats.
- Shift resources from detention to alternatives like case‑management programs.
- Empower independent inspectors and outside boards to investigate abuses.
- Reallocate some ICE functions, such as labor‑standards enforcement or trafficking investigations, to other agencies less associated with deportation.
This path would likely require Congress to revisit OBBBA, trimming detention funding and raising caps on immigration judges to ease the backlog.
3. Structural overhaul or abolition
A third, more radical path would dismantle ICE as we know it, either by abolishing the agency outright or folding its functions into other parts of the Department of Homeland Security under a new mandate.
Supporters say this would break an institutional culture they see as abusive and reset the relationship between enforcement and rights. Opponents counter that without a dedicated interior enforcement body, large‑scale non‑enforcement would effectively become policy, inviting further irregular migration, and eroding the rule of law.
Politically, this scenario would require a significant shift in public opinion and unified Democratic control, something party strategists currently see as unlikely in the near term.
The consequences for US democracy and politics
The future of ICE depends on multiple agencies, regardless of the route taken. It is fundamental to how the US establishes its borders, strikes a balance between due process and enforcement, and determines who is eligible.
Strong enforcement advocates contend that a strong ICE is necessary to protect American workers, enforce the law, and prevent future illegal immigration. Opponents view the current expansion as a test of US democracy, a warning about the extent to which militarized policing and executive power can be used under the pretext of immigration control.
In that sense, the debate over whether to “abolish,” “reform and retrain” or entrench ICE is less a technical argument about budgets than a proxy battle over what kind of country the United States wants to be one that addresses irregular migration primarily with handcuffs and detention beds, or one that tries to rebalance enforcement with legal pathways, oversight, and the slow work of rebuilding trust.
