Trump administration may pull money from TSA, Coast Guard to help ICE afford costly deportations

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is facing a budget shortfall that began before President Donald Trump took office but that could be an obstacle for his promise of mass deportations around the country now that it is the principal agency tasked with carrying out those deportations.

Trump administration officials are now considering pulling funding from the Transportation Security Administration to make up for it, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The administration is also looking at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Coast Guard as possible areas from which to take money to give ICE.

The executive branch is allowed to move money appropriated by Congress from one agency to another within a department, and the Trump administration would not be the first to do so to make up for an ICE budget shortfall.

Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

ICE was facing a $230 million budget shortfall even before Trump took office and ramped up deportations, when it averaged around 282 arrests per day. On Sunday, ICE arrested more than 1,200 people, according to a senior DHS official, and senior leaders at ICE have been told the agency must continue to arrest 1,200 to 1,500 people per day. 

A former and a current DHS official told NBC News that during the Biden administration the average cost to ICE to deport a single person was about $10,500, starting with the arrest through the person’s time in detention and onto a flight back to the person’s home country.

A Government Accountability Office report in May found that from 2014 to 2023, DHS — under which ICE, the TSA, CISA and the Coast Guard all fall — had notified Congress that it planned to move a total of $1.8 billion to help parts of ICE that needed more money. Some of that came from other parts of ICE, but most came from other agencies, including the TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard. 

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Cuts to TSA could be met with backlash if they led to longer lines at airports and impact travelers. Trump has publicly criticized the other agencies apparently contemplated as funding sources. He has gone after CISA for weighing in on what it deemed to be misinformation surrounding the 2020 presidential election. He also abruptly fired the commandant of the Coast Guard upon taking office.

Congress must be notified of such transfers, and there are limits on how much can be transferred. For example, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service report, in fiscal year 2023, up to 5% of any DHS appropriation could be moved elsewhere within DHS, so long as the recipient’s budget as originally set by Congress didn’t increase by more than 10%.

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In his inaugural address, Trump promised his administration would deport “millions and millions.” If the average cost to deport one person remains the same as during the previous administration, the Trump administration would be looking at spending $10.5 billion to deport just 1 million migrants. 

The average operating budget for all of ICE, which is also responsible for other issues, including customs violations, money laundering, drug trafficking investigations, stopping child exploitation and more, is about $9 billion, the former and current DHS officials said. 

In fiscal year 2023, during the Biden administration, DHS moved about $400 million to ICE from other parts of DHS. That money would cover the deportations of fewer than 40,000 people. 

To make up for staffing shortages at ICE, the Trump administration is also leaning on other law enforcement agencies to help ICE agents arrest migrants, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 

Former acting ICE Director P.J. Lechleitner said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE responsible for investigating human trafficking, drug trafficking and other international crimes with U.S. nexuses, may be strained in an effort to pull HSI agents into arresting and deporting migrants. 

“HSI will have to refocus their invested equities and pull resources off some of their other core areas,” Lechleitner said. “It’s a zero-sum game.”