Unpacking claims Trump admin budgeted more money for ICE than US Marine Corps
Overall spending on immigration enforcement could, however, reach well over $160 billion under Trump's policies, according to some estimates.
Rae Deng
Published July 8, 2025
(U.S. Marine Corps / U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
In the summer of 2025, a rumor spread online that lawmakers budgeted $160 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, supposedly more than they allocated to the U.S. Marine Corps.
However, total funding actually allocated to ICE was roughly $75 billion through September 2029, not $160 billion. The larger estimate appeared to reference potential total immigration enforcement spending — not ICE's spending alone — in U.S. President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB).
The OBBB did appear to allocate more funding to ICE than to the Marines, but it was unclear as of this writing whether ICE's total annual budget — including both OBBB funding of $75 billion through September 2029 and Trump's proposed fiscal year 2026 base budget of $11.29 billion (not yet approved by Congress) — would exceed that of the Marines.
The Marines included OBBB funding in its proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 — $2.3 billion on top of its $54.96 billion base budget, for a total annual budget of $57.26 billion.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/07/08/trump-ice-budget-marines/
