Answerable to No One but the President: Congress’s Abdication on ICE
At least 49 people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since January 2025. ICE has also detained more than 380,000 people, roughly the population of Cleveland.
But as White House border czar Tom Homan put it last week, “You ain’t seen shit yet.” ICE is about to “flood the zone,” he boasted, promising that Americans will see “more ICE agents [than] you ever seen before.”
Congress should respond to these promises with oversight. Instead, Republicans are poised to use the fast-track reconciliation process to fund ICE through the end of the Trump administration without Democratic votes. Their bill would give ICE $38 billion in new money, on top of the $63 billion left from last year’s reconciliation law. Together, ICE would have more than $100 billion, roughly 10 times its annual budget, to spend over the next three years.
This will be framed as a political win for Republicans, but it is actually Congress surrendering its power of the purse. Since 1789, Congress has funded agencies one year at a time, with conditions attached. This annual limit has been Congress’s most effective tool for controlling the executive branch. By forcing agencies to return every year, Congress can demand accountability and limit agencies’ use their next annual appropriation.
The Republican reconciliation bill would do more than free ICE from having to return to Congress. It also lacks the bipartisan riders that Congress has attached to its annual appropriations. These riders bar officials from destroying records related to detainee abuse, sexual assault, and deaths; prohibit the use of restraints on pregnant women in custody; and give members of Congress the right to inspect detention facilities. Congress added those limits in response to past misconduct. Removing them would invite more.
ICE has already used reconciliation funding to avoid congressional scrutiny. Three days after the killing of Renee Nicole Good in January 2026, Representatives Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison tried to enter ICE’s Minnesota headquarters and main detention center. They wanted answers about conditions inside the facility and demanded to be let inside, citing the appropriations rider guaranteeing them access. But ICE officials turned them away, arguing the site was funded through last year’s reconciliation law, not the annual appropriation.
A federal court eventually rejected that maneuver. It held that because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still relied on its annual funding, members of Congress had the right to enter ICE detention facilities. If congressional Republicans pass the new reconciliation bill, that protection, along with the other limits Congress has attached to ICE’s annual funding, will disappear.
Even Republican appropriators have warned that last year’s multi-year reconciliation funding made ICE less responsive to Congress. At an April 16 hearing, Representative Mark Amodei, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over ICE, criticized ICE for its “terrible” information sharing and warned that lawmakers had “learned some lessons” from last year’s reconciliation law.
These lessons were reflected in the annual DHS appropriations bill that passed the House in January. The bill would have required ICE to report on its detention operations and spending, barred ICE from contracting with substandard detention facilities, and required ICE to explain how it was using last year’s reconciliation money to expand its detention capacity.
Republicans ultimately took the opposite approach. They stripped ICE’s funding, and these protections, from the DHS appropriations law enacted last week, opting to instead fund the agency through reconciliation without safeguards.
This will help ICE accelerate its growth while reducing public scrutiny. On the same day that Tom Homan was boasting about ICE’s plan to “flood the zone,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “we’re purposely trying to be a little bit more quiet … so our ICE agents … could go do their job.”
ICE needs more oversight, not less. Even when it depended on annual appropriations, ICE shuttered its own internal detention oversight and spent billions to buy commercial facilities and convert them into mass detention sites. Inside this expanding system, detainees have staged hunger strikes over inadequate food, water, and medical care; ICE agents have used force, including chemical agents; and at least 49 people have died in ICE custody since January 2025. The reconciliation bill would remove Congress’s strongest remaining leverage just as the administration is promising more aggressive enforcement.
For an agency facing mounting legal challenges and deaths in custody, giving ICE years of funding in a single vote is not normal. It is an abdication: Congress is surrendering its power to hold ICE accountable. This is not a routine partisan debate over funding levels. It is a decision to leave ICE answerable to no one but the President.