How Trump transformed ICE, in two charts

Just a year into his second term, Donald Trump’s new, militarized immigration force is on full display.

Agents in masks and plate carriers are seemingly everywhere, first in Chicago last year and now in Minneapolis, where they have killed two US citizens and terrorized uncounted more. 

Some of that is because of a change in how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does its work; as my colleague Christian Paz has reported, under the second Trump administration, the agency has shifted from conducting relatively few direct arrests to trying to arrest as many people as possible, as fast as possible. 

And some of it is due to the fact that there are simply many more agents now: The Trump administration has prioritized hiring for both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and de facto immigration czar, has reportedly demanded daily updates on ICE’s recruitment numbers. 

This hiring blitz has been facilitated by a huge influx of new money from last year’s Trump-backed reconciliation package (what he branded as his “One Big Beautiful Bill”).

Here’s what that funding infusion looks like, in billions of dollars. 

ICE and CBP are both part of the Department of Homeland Security, but for context, the annual budget of the US Department of Justice, which houses many other federal law enforcement agencies, is also included. (The DOJ includes not only the FBI, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Collectively, they receive far less funding annually than either ICE or CBP did via the reconciliation package.)

In part, that money has gone toward a $100 million recruitment campaign to bring in new ICE officers, which the agency has described internally as “wartime recruitment,” according to the Washington Post. 

It has also meant new benefits for current and prospective ICE and CPB employees: Up to $50,000 in bonuses for new ICE agents and $60,000 for CBP, as well as possible student loan forgiveness. 

ICE’s spending is working, seemingly. The agency has added thousands of new employees in the past year, pushing its workforce to almost 27,000 people as of November 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). 

ICE’s true workforce may be even larger, however, though there are caveats. While we don’t have more recent OPM numbers, DHS said in an early January press release that it had successfully hired “10,000 new officers and agents,” after receiving more than 220,000 applications. (Those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt until backed up by OPM, given DHS’s serial dishonesty around ICE and its operations.)

As the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reported this week, it may take time for all of those new hires to reach the field, as many are still in training. But in the drive for raw numbers, training and recruiting standards have reportedly also fallen precipitously: The training course for new ICE recruits is now only 42 days, down from five months, and the agency is all but pulling people off the street. 

One journalist, Laura Jedeed, pursued a potential job with ICE as a reporting project; despite abandoning the process midway through, she writes for Slate that she was marked as having accepted a job offer with the agency without completing any of the requisite paperwork or a background check (she ultimately rejected the job).

Jedeed’s experience is maybe the perfect encapsulation of where ICE now finds itself: Flush with money, it’s rushing to meet lofty hiring goals and draconian deportation quotas. 

As the chaos in Minnesota proves, it’s doing both badly.