WASHINGTON — Congress has finally passed a $70 billion funding bill for federal immigration enforcement on Tuesday, putting to rest a four-month fight over the fate of President Trump’s mass deportations agenda.
House Republicans, in a party-line vote of 214-212, approved the spending for the Department of Homeland Security after the Senate had passed the measure last Friday. Democrats were universally opposed and joined in that opposition by Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), who recently left the GOP.
“With today’s vote, House and Senate Republicans have officially ended the third Democrat government shutdown of this Congress,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in a statement. “And here’s the end result of Democrats’ record-setting obstruction: CBP and ICE will now be funded for the remainder of President Trump’s term and Democrats will have no ability to defund these agencies in the 119th or 120th Congresses.”
DHS had been unfunded mostly from mid-February to April, with some immigration enforcement-focused agencies still requiring funding after that. The measure now moves to Trump’s desk for his signature.
Republicans had quibbled over including provisions for $1 billion for beefed up security at Trump’s White House ballroom, as well as a potential prohibition against using any funds for a $1.776 billion judgment fund to compensate perceived victims of “weaponized” prosecutions.
Neither item was tucked into the bill after weeks of deliberations — despite some GOP senators offering amendments to do away with the fund — and the legislation was passed by a simple majority in both chambers through a process known as budget reconciliation.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was the only Republican to oppose it.
Democrats in the upper chamber had delayed passage for three months before that, refusing to back an earlier spending measure in January in protest of federal immigration officers’ fatal shootings of two Americans in Minneapolis.
The Secure America Act provides more than $9.5 billion in funding to help hire and pay Border Patrol agents; nearly $3.5 billion for new border surveillance technologies and efforts to combat fentanyl or other drug trafficking; and almost $7.5 billion for retaining more Homeland Security Investigations agents.
The spending allows both Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Protection to be fully funded through 2029, with an extra $2.5 billion for other Department of Homeland Security programs.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Democrats had opposed the DHS funding after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, who were fatally shot while protesting a surge of federal officers to the Twin Cities for deportations.
The Democrats had pressed for universal body cameras — a concession that border czar Tom Homan said was already being implemented — as well as for ICE and CBP officers to go maskless and be forced to obtain judicial warrants for arrests
Neither of those concessions was secured during the four-month lapse in funding.
At the same time, neither ICE nor CBP were lacking funding due to Trump’s massive tax-and-spending package passed last July that had provided additional funding for immigration priorities.
Starting Feb. 14, DHS had to force its other employees to work without pay, including those helping airline passengers in the Transportation Security Administration, causing chaos at airports nationwide. Trump moved to provide backstop funding in late March to that agency apart from Congress.
In April, Democrats and Republicans reached a deal to fund immigration enforcement activities through ICE and CBP separately from other agencies in DHS.
Senate GOP suffered divisions in the following month after a third attempted assassination attempt against Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25 renewed calls for more security funding — in tandem with the president’s $400 million project to build a new ballroom.
Further fault lines were seen after the Department of Justice settled Trump’s suit over his personal tax returns being leaked by the IRS, resulting in a nearly $1.8 billion fund for the president’s allies like the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rioters, whom the administration viewed as having suffered politicized prosecutions.
The Trump administration maintained that the fund was open to any victim — including former first son Hunter Biden, who was federally prosecuted for tax and gun felonies while his father was in office.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and others opposed the fund in public comments before a more than two dozen amendments were rejected in a late-night, “vote-a-rama” on the legislation.
“All that Democrats have achieved by their shutdown is a useful reminder to the American people of their support for open borders and keeping criminal illegal immigrants in American communities — policies that have been soundly rejected by the American people over and over again,” Johnson added. “We hope this episode serves as a future reminder to Democrats that when they shut the government down, they will receive less than nothing in return.”
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