Where are California's ICE, CBP, Border Patrol agents making campaign contributions?

A quick analysis of FEC data from 2021 to 2024 in anticipation of the upcoming March 5 primary election

For more than 60 years, the federal agency in charge of administering immigration law was U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services. In California, an INS service center was located in the wealthy Orange County enclave of Laguna Niguel.

In 2003, under the George W. Bush administration, INS was discontinued.

Three newly launched agencies took over immigration services and law enforcement: Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Laguna Niguel is still a key immigration hub. The Department of Homeland Security, which is the cabinet agency that oversees USCIS, ICE and CBP, is now stationed there.

More on that later.

The March 5 primary election is coming up.

Given the scrutiny and fearmongering on border issues, I wanted to see which political committees are getting money from federal law enforcement agents in California who monitor the border.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, I tried to gather all campaign contributions from 2021 to 2024 made by donors who listed ICE, Customs and Border Protection or Border Patrol (which exists under CBP) as their employer, in addition to California as their home state. I excluded USCIS because it isn’t a law enforcement agency.

It’s not an exact science because campaign finance data is all self-reported. For example, that various ways ICE employees wrote down their employer included DHS ICE, ICE/DHS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, etc. So I have to try to find as many of the most common variations as I can, but it’s easy for at least a few to slip through the cracks. It’s also easy to add people you don’t want. For example, if I just searched for people who entered ICE in the employer field, it turned up more than a few ice cream shop employees.

(See my Github page for a more in-depth explanation of the methodology I used to put together this particular sample size.)

Anyway, my search criteria turned up 1,064 campaign contributions. (note: that’s not 1,064 different donors because it includes donors who made multiple contributions. It also doesn’t include every single person who gave money, because the FEC has a $200 threshold for reporting individual contributions.)

Those federal agents made a total of $21,770 in campaign contributions during that timespan. Here are five six graphs with a little insight into where that money came from and where it went:

Which committees received that money?

The chart above shows the top 10.

Not surprisingly, their contributions leaned heavily conservative. WINRED, which helps Republican candidates in various races across the country, received about 40% of the money.

(note: the Congressional Black Caucus is technically not a partisan organization, but I grouped it with Dem contributions because there are currently no Republican members of the caucus.)