A structural solution to ICE's failures: state-run enforcement or Congressional control. Neither left nor right—just better architecture.
ICE was built for a world that no longer exists. The architecture is misaligned economically, geographically, and constitutionally. The political debate is trapped in a binary that preserves the status quo. Neither "defund ICE" nor "increase funding" addresses the structural design failure.
The agency's budget has grown nearly 3x since creation, yet performance has not improved. More money has not solved the underlying architectural flaws.
*2026 figure includes base budget (~$10B) plus estimated annual allocation from the $75B supplement provided in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, available through 2029.1
For 30,000–40,000 beds funded annually
Annual total: ~$1.5B–$2.9B in detention costs alone
The architecture is designed to preserve itself. Both the presence economy and enforcement economy are profitable, entrenched, and represented in Congress.
The immigration debate is not ideological. It is economic. Both systems are profitable. Both are entrenched. This is why neither party wants to fundamentally restructure ICE—the current architecture serves both constituencies.
If the current system is structurally misaligned—economically, geographically, and constitutionally—then the solution is not to tweak ICE. It is to invert the architecture.
Invert the hierarchy: states run detention, transport, and tracking using existing infrastructure. Federal government provides funding, standards, and interstate coordination.
This model aligns enforcement with geography, reduces federal bloat, and disrupts the private detention economy.
States already have the infrastructure: They run jails, prisons, probation systems, and parole systems. They handle custody, transport, and tracking. They manage complex data systems. They coordinate with federal agencies.
The federal government sets the rules; states execute them. This is how most domestic policy works. Immigration enforcement is the outlier.
Governors: Gain operational control and federal funding streams
State Contractors: Still receive work, but through competitive state procurement
Taxpayers: Lower costs through infrastructure reuse
The Right: States' rights, decentralization, local control
The Left: Reduced federal overreach, increased accountability
States understand their waterways, interior transit networks, and local gang activity better than a centralized federal agency. This model focuses enforcement where it matters: organized criminal elements, not blanket detention theater.
Rebalance branch power by giving Congress a real enforcement arm. Immigration enforcement moves into a Capitol Police–aligned agency with national remit.
The executive loses its monopoly on domestic enforcement narratives. The branch that writes the laws gets enforcement muscle to match.
The structural imbalance: Congress has almost no enforcement capacity of its own. The Capitol Police are tiny compared to DHS. The branch that writes immigration law is structurally dependent on the branch that enforces it.
This is not partisan—it's architectural. Whether Trump or Biden or anyone else holds the executive, Congress should not be powerless to enforce its own legislative intent.
Congress: Actual power to enforce the laws it passes
The People: More direct accountability to elected representatives
The Right: Protection against executive overreach (today or tomorrow)
The Left: Checks on Trump (or any president) using ICE dictatorially
The founders designed three co-equal branches. Immigration enforcement should not be solely an executive function when Congress writes the laws and appropriates the funding. This model restores balance.
States handle custody and geography; Congress controls standards and escalation. The executive becomes one actor among several, not the sole owner of the enforcement machine.
Hybrid inversion hits both axes: geographic alignment through state execution and constitutional rebalancing through Congressional oversight.
States manage day-to-day detention, transport, and waterway enforcement. Congress sets standards, handles interstate coordination, and manages escalation for cases involving organized crime or national security. The executive provides intelligence and federal-level prosecution support but does not dominate enforcement narratives.
This model takes the operational efficiency of state-run enforcement and combines it with Congressional accountability. It's the most comprehensive structural fix—and the hardest to implement. But it's also the most durable.
The Department of Homeland Security is one of the youngest major institutions in the federal government, but it carries itself with the weight of something ancient. It has the scale of a Cold War bureaucracy, the posture of a national-security agency, and the political gravity of a department that touches nearly every aspect of American life. But the truth is simpler and stranger: DHS is a post-trauma construction, a super-agency built in the shadow of a single event, designed to solve a problem that no longer exists in the form it was imagined.
To understand why ICE functions the way it does in 2026, you have to understand the world it was built for. And that world is gone.
The political psychology of the early 2000s cannot be overstated. The country was terrified of bureaucratic gaps. Every failure was interpreted as a failure of coordination. Every vulnerability was framed as a failure of centralization. The solution, in the eyes of Congress and the White House, was to build something massive, unified, and vertically controlled.
The 9/11 Commission Report—one of the most influential documents of the era—hammered the idea that intelligence failures were failures of communication. The political class internalized this lesson with religious fervor. If fragmentation was the problem, then consolidation must be the solution.
In 2002, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, creating the Department of Homeland Security. It was the largest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. DHS absorbed 22 agencies, including INS, Customs, FEMA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the Federal Protective Service. It became a super-department with more than 180,000 employees and an initial budget of roughly $37 billion.
The logic was simple: unify everything that touches borders, security, or infrastructure. The result was anything but simple.
ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—was created in 2003 as part of this consolidation. But ICE was not designed as a single, coherent enforcement agency. It was stitched together from mismatched parts: the investigative arm of Customs, the interior enforcement arm of INS, and various protective and logistical units. The result was an agency with two incompatible missions: detention and removal on one side, and complex investigations on the other.
This split became formalized in the creation of two major components:
ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) – responsible for detention, transport, and removal
HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) – responsible for cybercrime, trafficking, smuggling, and financial crimes
ERO was built to be a mass-detention machine. HSI was built to be a modern investigative agency. They shared a name but not a mission. They shared a budget but not a purpose. They shared a chain of command but not a worldview.
This structural mismatch has haunted ICE for two decades.
By the 2010s, ICE had become a self-reinforcing system:
Congress funded detention beds.
Contractors built and operated facilities.
Rural counties relied on detention centers for jobs and federal dollars.
ICE relied on contractors for capacity.
Politicians relied on ICE for enforcement theater.
The architecture was locked in. The incentives were aligned. The system was stable—not because it worked, but because it was profitable for the right people.
But the world was changing.
ICE was built for a world where immigration was framed as a national-security threat, where centralization was assumed to be efficient, and where detention was the primary tool of control. None of those assumptions match the world of 2026.
Migration patterns have shifted. Asylum flows have increased. Labor markets have tightened. Urban economies depend on immigrant labor. Rural economies depend on enforcement dollars. The geography of vulnerability has changed—waterways, interior transit networks, and digital identity systems matter more than land borders.
ICE's architecture is mismatched to the terrain. And the public has begun to notice.
By 2026, the political debate around ICE has calcified into two predictable positions: defund ICE and increase ICE funding. Neither position is what it appears to be.
The slogan "defund ICE" emerged in the late 2010s as a response to family separation, detention abuses, and the militarization of immigration enforcement. But it was never a serious proposal to eliminate the agency. It was a symbolic demand to reduce or redirect funding. Even the most vocal proponents of "defund ICE" acknowledged that immigration enforcement would continue in some form.
In practice, "defund ICE" meant: reduce detention, increase alternatives to detention, shift resources to asylum processing, reduce contractor dependence, increase oversight.
These are policy tweaks, not structural reforms.
On the other side, calls to increase ICE funding are not serious proposals to modernize the agency. They are expressions of institutional inertia. ICE's budget has grown almost every year since its creation, regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House. The default assumption in Washington is that more money equals more security.
But ICE's performance has not improved with increased funding. The agency remains slow, inefficient, and structurally mismatched to modern migration patterns. More money has not solved the underlying architectural flaws.
Despite the rhetorical divide, both sides are marching toward the same outcome: preserving ICE as a federally controlled enforcement apparatus. The rhetoric differs. The incentives do not.
Democrats do not want to decentralize immigration enforcement because they fear a patchwork of state policies. Republicans do not want to decentralize immigration enforcement because they fear losing federal control. Both parties benefit from the political theater of a centralized enforcement agency.
The American public is increasingly skeptical of ICE—not because of ideology, but because of performance. Polling shows that even voters who support strong immigration enforcement are frustrated with ICE's inefficiency and lack of results. The agency is expensive, slow, and structurally mismatched to the migration patterns it is supposed to manage.
Public opinion has shifted for several reasons: ICE's detention system is costly and ineffective. The agency's dual mission creates confusion and inefficiency. The public sees ICE as politically weaponized. The agency's architecture does not match modern migration patterns.
ICE is failing for three structural reasons: (1) It was built for a world that no longer exists. (2) Its dual mission is inherently contradictory. (3) Its architecture is misaligned with modern migration patterns. The agency is not failing because of ideology. It is failing because of design.
The question is: Who controls immigration enforcement?
The immigration system is not broken because of ideology. It is broken because of architecture. ICE was built for a world that no longer exists, and the political debate around it is trapped inside a binary that preserves the status quo.
The real divide is economic. The real vulnerability is geographic. The real imbalance is constitutional.
To fix the system, you have to invert it.
Either by giving states the authority to execute immigration enforcement with federal support, or by giving Congress the enforcement muscle it currently lacks. Both paths break the stalemate. Both paths realign incentives. Both paths acknowledge the reality of 2026.
1. National Public Radio. (2026, January 21). How ICE became the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump
Note: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) enacted in July 2025 appropriated $75 billion to ICE over four years (2025–2029), in addition to base annual appropriations. This represents approximately $18.75 billion annually when distributed evenly, though the agency may allocate funds at varying rates within the authorized timeframe.
2. American Immigration Council. (2025, March 27). The Cost of Immigration Enforcement and Border Security. Retrieved from https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security/
3. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2024). Congressional Budget Justification FY 2025: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/2024_0308_us_immigration_and_customs_enforcement.pdf
4. Brennan Center for Justice. (2025, July). Big Budget Act Creates a "Deportation-Industrial Complex". Retrieved from https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/big-budget-act-creates-deportation-industrial-complex
5. U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. (2026). Fiscal Year 2026 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill Summary. Retrieved from https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fy26_homeland_security_conference_bill_summary.pdf
6. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2018). FY 2018 ICE Budget Congressional Justification. Retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ICE%20FY18%20Budget.pdf
Note: FY 2003 ICE initial budget of $3.3 billion derived from merged INS appropriations ($2.862 billion from INS Salaries and Expenses) and U.S. Customs Service investigations function, as documented in DHS Congressional Budget Justifications.
7. RepresentUs. (2025, July 17). ICE is now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. Retrieved from https://represent.us/explains/ice-accountability/
8. Taxpayers for Common Sense. (2026, January). Appropriations Bills on ICE. Retrieved from https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/appropriations-bills-on-ice/
Historical budget figures represent direct appropriations to ICE/INS and may not include supplemental appropriations, emergency funding, or fee-based revenue. The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act represents the largest single appropriation to immigration enforcement in U.S. history, fundamentally altering the scale and scope of ICE operations. Detention bed capacity figures and per-diem costs are derived from annual Congressional appropriations language and DHS budget justifications. Private contractor market share estimates are based on facility ownership and operation contracts reported by the American Immigration Council and other oversight organizations.
TL;DR: You write the laws but have zero enforcement muscle. The executive dominates immigration enforcement narratives, and you're structurally dependent on them.
The pitch: Restore constitutional balance. The branch that writes immigration law should have the power to enforce it.
TL;DR: You already run jails, prisons, probation, parole, and transport. Immigration enforcement should work the same way—you execute, federal funds it.
The pitch: States' rights applied to immigration. Federal dollars, state execution, better geographic alignment.
TL;DR: ICE costs $9+ billion/year and doesn't work. The current system is designed to preserve itself, not to solve problems.
The pitch: Better outcomes at lower cost. This isn't about left vs. right—it's about fixing broken architecture.