Senate Passes $70 Billion ICE Funding Bill

Republicans in the upper chamber cleared the money for immigration enforcement. Now they have to do it again in the House where Johnson's majority is essentially a moot point.

WASHINGTON — The Senate handed President Donald Trump $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol (CBP) before 5 a.m. Friday — a multi-year funding package Republicans rammed through on a party-one reconciliation vote, no Democratic support required. The final tally: 52-47.

But the vote was only half the battle. The bill now moves to the House, where a GOP conference that has spent months fighting itself over the shape, size, and contents of this legislation is waiting.

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A Night of Votes That Changed Nothing

The vote-a-rama that stretched across Thursday and into Friday’s predawn hours was, at its core, a test of whether Senate Republicans would put limits on a separate controversy riding alongside the immigration money: Trump’s $1.776 billion anti-weaponization settlement fund — a payout mechanism tied to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.

They wouldn’t.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., tried hardest. He spent hours in talks with the Senate Parliamentarian, searching for a way to redirect the fund’s payouts to law enforcement officers injured on Jan. 6, 2021. It would have been a pointed rebuke: Trump’s fund, by design, could flow to the same people who beat those officers. Cassidy’s amendment failed.

Before that, a Democratic motion to ban the settlement outright was held open for hours as vulnerable Republicans — including Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, both facing reelection — deliberated. Cassidy eventually voted against it, sealing its defeat. Husted and Sullivan voted yes, for whatever that was worth.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., offered a separate amendment that would have banned the fund and redirected the money to a Department of Justice anti-fraud account. Most Democrats voted against it anyway, and it died.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had the sharpest summary of where things landed: Republicans were leaving taxpayers to rely on a promise from “Donald Trump’s personal fixer. That is not accountability. That is a permission slip.”

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What the Bill Actually Does

The $70 billion package funds ICE and the Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term — roughly three years. Republicans used budget reconciliation to get around the 60-vote filibuster threshold, bypassing Democratic objections entirely.

Democrats had blocked ICE and Border Patrol funding since early this year, demanding policy reforms following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January. Those demands — better officer identification, increased use of judicial warrants — went nowhere in negotiations. The rest of the Department of Homeland Security was eventually funded in late April with bipartisan support, but ICE and CBP remained without regular appropriations until Friday’s vote.

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The House Is a Different Animal

Passing this bill in the Senate was always going to be easier than passing it in the House, and the history of this legislation makes that plain.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., has already signaled his members aren’t in any rush. “There’s no emergency about moving it by June 1, except the president has thrown it out there,” Harris told reporters — and that was before the Senate even finished its vote. CBS News

The Freedom Caucus has been a recurring obstacle throughout this process. The group has called for fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security in a single GOP-only reconciliation bill, rejecting leadership’s two-step approach that pairs the partisan ICE funding bill with the bipartisan Senate bill covering the rest of DHS. The Hill

Sequencing is Speaker Mike Johnson’s other headache. House Republicans have resisted passing the bipartisan Senate bill funding the rest of DHS and sat on it for weeks, insisting on securing immigration enforcement funding first. Now that the Senate has delivered that, Johnson still has to convince his conference that the two-track approach holds — and that a promised third reconciliation bill for other priorities will actually materialize. The Hill

The weaponization fund, which Senate Republicans spent all night failing to kill, is now the House’s problem too. GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., expressed “urgent concern” about the anti-weaponization fund, calling it a dangerous threat to institutional transparency — and said he will not support funding for it. He won’t be alone. CBS News

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who shepherded the bill through a chaotic overnight session, offered a measured warning before the final vote: other parts of DHS may run out of money before the House finishes its work.

The fund survived. The Senate voted. Now the House decides whether ICE gets its money — and whether the slush fund that shadowed this bill across two chambers gets to survive the trip.