Here's How the Administration Plans to Spend the Largest Immigration Enforcement Funding Surge in History
As the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown extends past 40 days, an uncomfortable irony is playing out in Washington. Democrats are withholding funding to demand greater oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Yet the agencies at the center of this dispute are largely unaffected, continuing operations thanks to a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar infusion of cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). There is virtually no comprehensive public accounting of how the more than $190 billion in OBBBA funds allocated to DHS have been or will be spent. That should be extraordinarily concerning, given the raw size of the cash infusion (ICE received 7 times its annual budget) and reports about unlawful behavior, poor oversight, and misuse of taxpayer resources.
Using publicly available apportionment data and Treasury outlays through February, I estimate the administration has released $114 billion of $191 billion in available OBBBA funds for DHS to spend—including $33 billion to ICE and $56 billion to CBP—with roughly $77 billion still available for apportionment.
While these data can provide limited insight into how the administration plans to use OBBBA funds, it also reveals a larger problem. We don’t know whether OBBBA spending is consistent with statutory instruction or even how much has already gone out the door. Without robust transparency, Congress cannot conduct oversight, course-correct poor policy, or deter the misuse of taxpayer resources. The system of checks and balances that undergirds our constitutional republic suffers as a result.
Congress Knows What Was Appropriated, but Not What’s Been Spent
Congress has provided DHS with roughly $191 billion via the OBBBA. Of that $191 billion, Congress earmarked around $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for CBP, the federal government’s two primary immigration and border enforcement agencies. That is seven times ICE’s annual budget and four times CBP’s typical annual budget. The next largest line item is a $25 billion appropriation for the Coast Guard. A further $10 billion is provided in Section 90007 as an effectively unrestricted DHS slush fund. Table 1 lists key OBBBA funding categories for DHS.
But knowing what Congress appropriated is very different from knowing how the administration has used these funds. As 21 senators noted in a recent letter to the Congressional Budget Office, there is no comprehensive public accounting of how OBBBA DHS funds are being obligated or spent.
In short, the branch vested with the power of the purse cannot determine how the largest immigration enforcement spending increase ever for CBP and ICE is being used.
What Has Been Apportioned?
By law, OMB must publicly release plans for how the administration intends to use available budgetary resources, called apportionments. These apportionments create a legally binding upper bound on what an agency can spend. Importantly, agencies may spend less than is apportioned, so these plans represent the ceiling of available budgetary resources, not final obligations or outlays.
Based on OMB apportionment data through February 2026, the administration has released $113.9 billion in OBBBA funds for DHS to spend—$12 billion in FY2025 (OBBBA was enacted on July 4, 2025) and $101.9 billion in FY2026. That leaves roughly $77 billion available for apportionment in FY2027 and beyond. The chart below illustrates the cumulative apportionment of OBBBA resources to DHS.
As of February, ICE and CBP were apportioned $33 billion and $56 billion, respectively. Table 2 shows apportionments for each DHS agency.
Within ICE, the single largest category is detention. More than $24.8 billion has been apportioned for ICE detention facilities across FY2025 and FY2026. That’s nearly three times the annual spending for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
For CBP, border wall construction dominates, with at least $40 billion apportioned. Personnel, facilities, vehicles, and surveillance technology account for most of the remaining $16 billion.
What Has Actually Gone Out the Door?
Apportionments provide only a limited picture of how OBBBA funds will be used. Other data sources that could reveal how OBBBA funds have been deployed are inadequate. Some reporting, for example, has cited USAspending.gov, a government tool intended to track federal obligations down to the individual award and grant level. Unfortunately, USAspending.gov relies on agency-submitted data that is often incomplete, delayed, or inaccurate. Comparable data sources have similar problems.
The most reliable alternative is the Monthly Treasury Statement. Per Treasury, total DHS outlays in FY2026 (October 2025 through February 2026) are actually lower than the same period last year: $46.9 billion versus $60.2 billion. But that headline figure is mostly driven by a reduction in FEMA disaster relief outlays. When you look at ICE and CBP, the picture changes (see Table 3).
ICE’s FY2026 outlays through February totaled $10.7 billion. Before the OBBBA took effect, ICE averaged ~$800 million per month between October and February. Post-OBBBA, that average has risen to $1.7 billion per month.
CBP tells a different story. Despite $56 billion in OBBBA apportionments, CBP’s FY2026 outlays through February are $8.8 billion, compared to $8.5 billion in the prior fiscal period, a 4 percent increase.
This discrepancy may be due to the underlying OBBBA provisions funding these agencies. Most of the CBP funding is for border wall construction, which may involve a multi-month to multi-year lag between obligation and outlay. Meanwhile, the OBBBA seems to provide ICE with greater flexibility to spend more quickly, given that it can lease existing private facilities and has a larger budget to hire new personnel. In any case, the CBP funds will eventually appear in Treasury data, just not yet.
There is also a useful natural experiment on the horizon. Regular annual DHS appropriations lapsed in February 2026. New Monthly Treasury Statements for ICE and CBP will soon reflect almost exclusively OBBBA-funded activity, providing the cleanest available signal for measuring OBBBA outlay velocity going forward.
Shades of the Pandemic
During the pandemic, Congress approved a multi-trillion-dollar spending surge across a series of emergency stimulus bills. Waste, fraud, and abuse followed, in part because the sheer scale of spending outstripped the weak oversight capacity of both Congress and the executive branch.
By shifting an unprecedented surge in immigration enforcement spending outside the annual appropriations process, Congress has similarly short-circuited the mechanisms that normally enable accountability. OBBBA’s funding structures mean that neither congressional appropriators nor independent watchdogs can easily track how the money is being used.
Both of these funding episodes—and the associated transparency and oversight problems—are part of a broader trend of institutional erosion in Congress. Over the years, legislators have increasingly ceded spending and policy control to the executive branch. Republicans and Democrats alike should be wary of the gradual decay of the system of checks and balances that secures all Americans’ freedoms.
The Path Forward
As with the pandemic, the cleanest solution is to simply not spend the money in the first place. Ideally, Congress would rescind unobligated OBBBA funds. If Congress still wants to fund these programs, it should do so through regular discretionary appropriations and limit multi-year availability.
Short of rescissions, the Department of Homeland Security, like every federal department and agency, should release clear, detailed spending plans. Congress can compel agencies to do so by strengthening existing reporting requirements and tools, such as USAspending.gov, or by attaching targeted DHS reporting requirements in appropriations bills.
One recent bipartisan bill, the Expedited Transparency Act, introduced by Representatives Brecheen (R‑OK) and Panetta (D‑CA), would take a step in the right direction by shortening the current 30-day posting window for federal disbursements on USASpending.gov to three business days.
Regardless of what you think about the administration’s deportation campaign, all public spending decisions deserve transparent accounting. OBBBA should be no different.