DHS has released the congressional budget justification (CBJ) for ICE’s FY 2027 funding requests, and a number of statistics that were heretofore hidden from public view are revealed therein. For starters, nearly 167,000 aliens with criminal convictions and arrests were removed or returned last year, and ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) plans on boosting that total to 500,000 in FY 2026 as part of a target of one million total removals and returns this fiscal year and next. Now it’s time for the agency to fulfill its promises — and for Congress to pony up the cash that would enable it to do so.
The Congressional Budget Justification Process
As the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) explains:
After the submission of the President's budget request, each executive agency bears the responsibility for justifying its budget request to gain approval from Congress. Executive agencies typically justify their budget requests in three main ways:
1. Budget Appendix. Each agency provides the supporting materials for the account and program detail in the budget Appendix volume.
2. Congressional budget justification (CBJ) documents. An agency's budget justification builds upon the information included in the Appendix and generally consists of a detailed description of agency budgetary accounts.
3. Agency testimony before Congress. Hearings before appropriations subcommittees provide a venue where agency officials can justify and explain their budget requests to Congress. These hearings often focus on the information included in agency budget justification documents.
Think of the annual CBJ as the Rocket Money app on a much larger, public scale.
If you are not familiar, the app keeps track of how much the user spends each month to allow the user to decide whether that outstream is the best use of the user’s money. If you have two Netflix accounts, for example, it tells you how to cancel one or both so you can just stick with Amazon Prime.
In much the same way, the CBJ explains to appropriators on Capitol Hill how any given agency has used its funds during the preceding five fiscal years and how it intends to use whatever funding it receives in the current fiscal year and the next one, so Congress can decide to cut funding, boost it, or leave it as is.
$10.451 Billion in Funding Requests
Starting with the bottom line, DHS is asking Congress for just over $10.451 billion in FY 2027, a relatively modest increase of roughly $30 million compared to FY 2025 and yet-to-be-passed FY 2026 funding.
In D.C. terms, that’s chump change (“chump” being the taxpayers), but given the increasing calls on the left to “abolish” the agency entirely, expect appropriators to pore over each penny, and (as a fiscal conservative who just paid his tax bill) that’s fine with me — if only they applied the same scrutiny to the budget in toto, which unfortunately Congress doesn’t do.
“Strategic Measures”
The real action can be found on pages 16 through 24 of that (161-page) document, the “Component Overview” section that tells Congress what ICE has done and plans to do.
There are plenty of juicy statistics in there, but a handful stand out.
In FY 2025, for example, officers from the ICE ERO directorate returned or removed nearly 442,700 aliens from the United States, of whom just less than 170,000 were aliens with a “criminal record”, that is either a criminal arrest or conviction.
In other words, fewer than 38 percent of all alien returns and removals in FY 2025 involved aliens with some criminal history, a stat the president’s critics will likely latch onto in complaining it undermines Trump’s claims to be going after the “worst of the worst” of the unauthorized population.
Some analysis is required to understand those figures, however.
Specifically, they represent a 63 percent increase in total returns and removals compared to FY 2024 (the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration), but an 88 percent increase in returns and removals of aliens with criminal records over the same period.
In other words, ICE did deport more non-criminal aliens in FY 2025 than ICE under Biden had in FY 2024, but it returned and removed many more criminals, too, and a higher percentage (37.7 percent) of total returns and removals involved alien criminals last fiscal year (partially under Trump II) than in the fiscal year prior (32.6 percent), all under Biden.
The increase in both total removals and returns and criminal removals and returns makes sense when you consider that a key tenet of then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s non-enforcement policies was throttling back ICE removals of aliens generally, including (and especially) criminals.
If you want proof, consider that, according to the CBJ, Mayorkas imposed a target of just 60,000 ICE ERO returns and removals of criminal aliens in FY 2024 (which officers overshot by nearly 29,000) during a period when nearly 650,000 criminal aliens were on ICE’s non-detained docket.
Moreover (but importantly), these statistics involve “returns and removals”, the former a term that refers to aliens apprehended by CBP at the border who are handed over to ICE ERO for return. Officers are obliged to return all of those aliens, regardless of whether they have criminal records or not.
Interior Arrests
The reason why ICE ERO is removing so many more criminals now can be found in a separate dataset in the CBJ, which measures the number of aliens with criminal histories that immigration officers have arrested in the United States over the past two fiscal years.
In FY 2025, ICE officers made more than 167,650 “interior arrests” of criminal aliens in the United States, more than doubling the FY 2024 total (81,312) and beating their Mayorkas-imposed target of 75,000 interior arrests of criminals by 124 percent.
No statistic better demonstrates the emphasis Trump “Border Czar” Tom Homan has placed on enforcing the immigration laws against criminal aliens better than that one, because ICE can’t deport any alien until it takes that alien into custody, and it is revving up criminal alien arrests.
Future Targets
Like the two-faced Janus of myth, the CBJ is ICE’s opportunity to look both forward and back, and there is a lot in the agency’s future plans that should hearten Trump’s critics on the right who want more immigration enforcement.
According to the CBJ, ICE plans on making at least 400,000 interior arrests of criminal aliens in both FY 2026 and FY 2027, more than doubling ERO officers’ haul last year, and removing or returning 500,000 aliens with criminal histories, trebling their FY 2025 criminal alien total.
That’s ambitious, but not as ambitious as the agency’s target of one million total removals in both the current fiscal year and the next one.
That should hearten the immigration hawks in the Mass Deportation Coalition (MDC), who have produced a “playbook” they claim would allow officers “to achieve a bare minimum of 1,000,000 ICE interior removals in 2026”.
The playbook — which runs about 100 pages in its printed form — includes proposals to increase removals by boosting worksite enforcement (pushed by my boss Mark Krikorian), debanking the unauthorized population (championed by my colleague George Fishman), expanding civil fines and forfeitures for aliens who fail to depart (a favorite of my former colleague Jon Feere), and increasing criminal prosecutions for illegal entrants (an evergreen theme of my erstwhile colleague Todd Bensman), as well as a handful of ideas I have had in the past on alien registration, asylum reforms, and detention.
In other words, the Center concurs with the MDC playbook that there are many effective tools this and any other administration could use to drive down the unauthorized population; the only question to this point was whether Trump II would be willing to employ them.
“Real Immigration Enforcement Has Never Been Tried”
The ICE CBJ’s targets for alien arrests and removals suggest that the administration is willing to try using all the tools at its disposal, but given that Congress hasn’t provided funding for the agency since February 14, the next question is whether the legislative branch is willing to pay for the enforcement it has mandated in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), or is simply paying lip service to its constituents.
Taking a page from Marxists who explain away their (many) failures by claiming “real communism has never been tried”, I’d argue (likely more effectively) that neither has “real immigration enforcement”.
The INA is chockful of rules and requirements aliens must follow to come to this country and remain here legally, but successive Congresses and administrations have gotten cold feet when immigration officers try to enforce them.
ICE’s FY 2027 congressional budget justification reveals that DHS is trying to fulfill the president’s promises to boost deportations and remove dangerous criminals from our communities, and that it has bold plans to expand both efforts in the immediate future. Now it’s time for Congress to either put up the funding to do so or change the law — and either way, explain it to the voters back home.