ICE Budget Now Bigger Than Most of the Militaries | Hacker News Reader

ICE Budget Now Bigger Than Most of the Militaries

newsweek.com

57 pointsKnuthIsGod16 comments

Here's some other US federal agencies that also have annual budgets bigger than most of the world's militaries:

   - Food and Nutrition Service (USDA) (~$142B)
   - NIH (~$47B)
   - Tenant-Based Rental Assistance / Housing Choice Vouchers (HUD) (~$36B)
   - Pell Grant Program (~$34.5B)
   - Federal Highway Administration (DOT) (~$62.8B)
   - Environmental Protection Agency (~$41B, might be out of date)
   - Department of Energy (~$58B)
   - Department of State (~$58B)
   - Department of Housing and Urban Development (~$62B)
   - Department of Labor (~$98B)

Of course, none of those are ICE. What’s more interesting is that ICE’s budget jumped from $8B to ~$37B—a nearly five-fold increase. That should be the headline.

Comparing it to national militaries is a bit silly IMHO, since as the world’s largest economy the US federal government spends heavily across almost every sector.

What's also noteworthy is that ICE’s real budget is much more than its recently-increased paper budget, since resources and personnel paid for for by the budgets of every other federal law enforcement agency are being redirected to ICE operations.

I still cannot understand how people understand the basis behind import controls and security for most things but blow a fuse when it comes to humans entering countries illegally.

Once something becomes political, it becomes intertwined with all the other political issues they're concerned/upset about. Everyone suffers from this to some degree; to many, the only thing they really need to know to form an opinion is their chosen party's stance on an issue.

Spending more than most militaries on it is a breathtakingly stupid solution to a self-inflicted problem.

> I still cannot understand how people understand the basis behind import controls and security for most things but blow a fuse when it comes to humans entering countries illegally

You don't understand why people see a difference between humans and trade goods?

It's simple, I pay taxes.

It's incredible how priorities are so backwards.

This surely isn’t going to cause a lot of deaths in the next few years, no siree.

This is from almost two months ago and it doesn't even have information about the finalized version of the bill. Why is it posted like this now?

The immigration numbers so far looks pretty encouraging. Illegal immigration is down 92%. The proposed budget works out to 37.5 billion dollars a year.

While that sounds overly excessive, the UK at a fifth of the population size is spending 6.5, billion pounds a year to encourage illegal immigrants to come into the country. I understand it's not a perfect comparison but I think it's worth pointing out that there are far stupider and more expensive ways that other countries are dealing with the same situation.

> the UK .. is spending 6.5 billion pounds a year to encourage illegal immigrants to come into the country.

Can you expand on this for non UK readers?

I'll do my best. Basically, the UK has signed up to various Human rights treaties which means that anybody who comes into the country by any means has right to claim asylum. While their asylum claim is being processed the UK government must provide them with food and shelter. Many asylum requests are granted on spurious grounds, and often even when rejected the individual still stays in the UK for a variety of reasons.

In the past few years there have been huge numbers of illegal immigrants abusing that system. And successive governments have absolutely no strategy for dealing with it. Hence record numbers of illegal immigration and a huge bill.

Really the whole situation is painfully dumb, but the politicians and civil servants couldn't care because they don't suffer from the consequences of their own incompetence.

I guessed this was the type of thing to which you referred.

The real question here, though, is where does the 6.5 billion pound number come from? Who is quoting it, what's their justification for that figure, and does that give a real and accurate account of any "drain" on the UK economy?

( eg: of that amount how much goes into the pockets of "illegal immigrants" and stays there (or is transferred out of the UK), how much goes into the pockets of UK shopkeepers and landlords and recirculates within the UK economy )

The big picture on economic flow activity really is important in these debates, the US is facing one cost of immigration enforcement being the loss of cheap labour in construction, hospitality, and agriculture, with knock on effects - these costs over and above the costs of funding a massive and unaccountable para military force.

I understand that, but I think that level of impact assessment is going a bit too far. I doubt any other project has ever had to take those into account.

I got my figures from Google, and it's the money the home office say they spent housing asylum seekers, again this takes into account no other negative knock on effects.

It's always preferable on HN to provide a hard link when quoting figures.

For example when I searched for the same information just now I found links to both newspaper reports and a current UK audit that state*:

  Home Office says Labour inherited asylum system in chaos with applicants stuck in backlog.

  Accommodation for asylum seekers is expected to cost more than £15bn, three times the amount the Home Office originally estimated, according to the latest figures.

  The Conservative government signed contracts in 2019 that were due to pay £4.5bn of taxpayers’ money to three companies over a decade.

  However, a report by the National Audit Office, the government spending watchdog, says that number is now estimated to be £15.3bn over the 10-year period.

Which suggests the housing cost has blown out by a factor of three to be a whopping £1.5bn per year. Somewhat less than the figure you gave without reference up thread.

Still, it's not all that bad, the new UK government is claiming that:

  A Home Office spokesperson said: “As this report shows we inherited an asylum system in chaos with tens of thousands stuck in a backlog, claims not being processed and disastrous contracts that were wasting millions in taxpayer money.

  “We’ve taken immediate action to fix it – increasing asylum decision making by 52% and removing 24,000 people with no right to be here, meaning there are now fewer asylum hotels open than since the election. By restoring grip on the system and speeding up decision making we will end the use of hotels and are forecast to save the taxpayer £4bn by the end of 2026.”

Bringing the annual cost down in the four to five years remaining.

> but I think that level of impact assessment is going a bit too far. I doubt any other project has ever had to take those into account.

Well, you'd be wrong on that point, it's common for economists to look at the knock effects of money moving through through an economy, there's even several terms for different aspects of that, eg: multiplier effect **.

(I recall that one from high school economics 101 some 45+ years past)

In this instance it's literally a case of UK taxpayer money being paid out to other UK taxpaying companies, mostly large, some small, and being injected back into the UK economy as ?? (more building, more investment, more taxable activity).

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/07/uk-asylum-seek...

** https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1948/economics/the-multip...

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