A flat appropriated base, and a surge that went around it.
Department of Homeland Security · ICE
ICE's net-discretionary appropriated base, FY2024–FY2027, as printed across the DHS Budget-in-Brief. ICE is not a separate row in OMB's agency-level Historical Tables, so there is no synthesized long series — this is the window the budget documents actually publish. Over it, the appropriated base barely moves. The historic expansion of immigration enforcement was funded off that base, through the FY2025 reconciliation law — kept here as a separate, mandatory overlay, never folded in.
FY2024 net discretionary
—
enacted · appropriated base
FY2027 net discretionary
—
request · appropriated base
Base change over window
—
nominal, appropriated only
Years published
—
BIB window — self-checked to the $
ICE net-discretionary base — the recent arc
nominal (current $) · DHS Budget-in-BriefReading the arc
Two things are true at once, and only stay honest if they are kept apart. ICE's appropriated base — what the annual DHS appropriation funds — is nearly flat across the window. Yet total immigration-enforcement funding rose sharply, because the FY2025 reconciliation law added mandatory money outside that appropriation. A monitor that folds the two together reports a number Congress never appropriated in a bill; one that keeps them separate reports what each authority actually did. That separation is the whole discipline — and it is exactly what breaks down when execution has to be reconciled after the fact, the subject of the audit page.