Beck: "As of 2014, Border Patrol and ICE employees made up 80,000 of the 200,000 people working for the entire Department of Homeland Security, with some 650,000 local police officers also tasked to immigration enforcement. To put that into context, there are only four militaries in the world with more people on active duty than the number of Americans working on border enforcement alone."
these numbers predate Trump and (especially) predate 2025's Big Beautiful Bill (which earmarked "$150 billion for border enforcement and deportations" (per Wikipedia). Also Wikipedia: "The law increases the funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from $10 billion to more than $100 billion by 2029")
interestingly, Wikipedia pegs Border Patrol employees at 19,648 agents in 2019 and NYT (see below) pegs ICE employees at 20,000 in 2019 (approaching 30,000 now) so that puts it at about half of how Beck counts it? (Beck's footnote for this passage only points to a Statista chart about the size of armies)
