Senate to Halve Immigration Enforcement Funds in ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Revision
Homeland Security Chair Rand Paul: Senate will seek major cuts to House $150B anti-immigrant package, citing inflated wall costs and lack of justification.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said this week that his panel plans to cut proposed immigration enforcement funding in half as part of its changes to a House-passed bill that aims to enact President Trump’s immigration agenda.
“It will actually be the conservative version of how much money we spend,” Paul told reporters, adding that the Senate version of the bill would slash the $150 billion package advanced by the House to roughly $75 billion.
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Paul has consistently pushed back on the $150 billion figure since border crossings plummeted after Trump took office in January. “We don’t need $150 billion to secure the border,” he wrote in a social media post on Monday. “We can do it for half that — $75 billion — and still protect the American people. The math backs it up.” Paul said he would submit his revisions to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).
The proposed cuts stem in part from what Paul described as a mismatch between publicly available cost estimates and the administration’s funding request. Speaking to reporters, Paul cited prior data from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) website estimating the cost of building the border wall at $6.5 million per mile. “If you add that up for about 1,000 miles, that’s $6.5 billion,” he said. “They asked for $46.5 billion, so they got a math problem.”
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He added that CBP “took that off their website two days ago” after he began raising questions. Paul elaborated to Migrant Insider in a hallway interview on Wednesday:
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