ICE and CBP Spending under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) appropriated $162 billion for immigration enforcement and border security—$75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), $65 billion to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and $22 billion to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This roughly equals the combined annual spending of state and local police departments. These funds will be available through September 2029 and will expand the agencies’ detention and deportation programs to an unprecedented scale.
This post explains how funding from OBBA augmented the agencies’ annual funding and uses USASpending.gov data to show how ICE and CBP have spent this money since OBBA passed.
How Are ICE and CBP Funded?
Since 2004, ICE and CBP have been funded by the annual Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriations act. Congress last enacted DHS’s annual appropriation in March 2024, providing $19.3 billion to CBP and $9.6 billion to ICE. Over 95% of this funding covers day-to-day operations. This funding is available for 12 months and is subject to additional statutory limitations.
Since October 2024, continuing resolutions have extended ICE and CBP’s FY24 appropriations. A March 2025 continuing resolution increased ICE’s appropriation by $485 million while maintaining CBP’s FY24 funding. The agencies’ current continuing resolution expired on January 30th. On January 22nd, the House of Representatives passed a DHS appropriations act that would provide CBP with $17.7 billion and ICE with $10 billion. On January 30th, the Senate passed a continuing resolution for DHS through February 13th. The House is expected to consider the Senate-passed legislation on February 3rd.
Separate from the annual appropriations cycle, Congress enacted OBBA in July 2025, which appropriated $140 billion to ICE and CBP. Unlike annual appropriations, this funding is available for four years (through September 30, 2029) and is not subject to the limitations included in the agencies’ annual appropriation.
Figure 1 shows CBP’s and ICE’s available funding from FY2020 through FY2026 and the scale of OBBA’s appropriations.
How Has ICE and CBP’s Spending Changed?
USAspending.gov, the federal government’s hub for fiscal data, receives contract award data from agencies almost daily. This data reveals how ICE and CBP’s contracting has changed since OBBA’s enactment. USAspending.gov also publishes data on internal spending like salaries and facilities, but these updates lag and are harder to access. The following analysis focuses on contract awards only.
Figure 2 shows ICE and CBP’s combined third-party contract obligations from January 2024 through January 2026. These obligations represent formal financial commitments that the agencies agreed to, not the amount of funds that have been disbursed. OBBA’s impact is immediate. Since the law passed last July, ICE and CBP have obligated $19.2 billion—2.25 times what they obligated in calendar year 2024.
How Are They Spending the Money?
Figure 3 breaks down the $19.2 billion in post-OBBA spending by functional category.
Border infrastructure dominates. CBP spent $12.1 billion (63%) on construction, with the largest contracts funding border wall projects.
Information technology ranks second at $1.8 billion, with CBP accounting for $1.4 billion of that total.
Deportation and transport comes third at $1.7 billion, nearly all from ICE. Air transportation ($1 billion) and logistics support ($599 million) account for most of this category. The increase is stark: ICE spent just $389 million on transportation and logistics in all of 2024. If ICE’s current pace of post-OBBA spending continues, the agency will spend $2.8 billion on these contract categories by July—more than seven times what it spent in calendar year 2024.
Figure 4 shows the top 10 recipients of CBP’s and ICE’s post-OBBA spending.
Top Contract Recipients
Fisher Sand & Gravel Co. ($6.18B, CBP): A North Dakota-based construction firm. Fisher previously built border wall prototypes during Trump’s first term. A summary of the firm’s contract is available here.
BCCG A Joint Venture ($3.14B, CBP): This entity shares an address with Caddell Construction, a design and build commercial construction firm based in Montgomery, Alabama. The joint venture’s contracts have been related to border wall construction. The entity won 7 of the first 10 border wall construction projects funded by OBBA.
SLS Federal Services LLC ($1.04B, CBP): A construction firm based in Galveston, Texas that has also been awarded contracts for border wall construction.
CSI Aviation, Inc. ($1.02B, ICE): An Albuquerque-based charter aviation company operating deportation and enforcement flights for ICE. A summary of the firm’s contracts is available here.
Barnard Spencer Joint Venture ($778M, CBP): A heavy construction partnership with contracts for border wall construction projects near El Paso ($579M) and Yuma ($200M)—won two of the first 10 border wall projects funded by OBBA. The joint venture shares an address with Barnard Construction based in Bozeman, Montana.
Acquisition Logistics LLC ($598M, ICE): A Virginia-based logistics firm that has been awarded contracts from the Defense Department, CBP, and ICE for a new detention facility near El Paso.
Anduril Industries, Inc. ($508M, CBP): A defense technology firm founded in 2017. The company has been awarded contracts for building “autonomous” surveillance towers for border monitoring.
The Geo Group, Inc. ($344M, ICE): A publicly traded, for-profit prison company operating ~74,000 beds across 97 detention and correctional facilities, including ICE immigration centers. A summary of its CBP and ICE contracts is available here.
Tribalco, LLC ($306M, ICE): An IT and telecommunications firm based in Bethesda, Maryland, providing systems for defense and law enforcement clients. A summary of the firm’s contracts with CBP and ICE is available here.
CACI, Inc. - Federal ($264M, CBP): The federal arm of CACI International, a major government contractor providing IT services to military and law enforcement agencies. A summary of the firm’s CBP and ICE contracts is available here.
Complete lists of CBP’s post-OBBA contract recipients are available here, and ICE’s recipients are available here.