As another funding deadline looms over Capitol Hill, the biggest question is how lawmakers will approach the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The answer came Tuesday, when House and Senate appropriators released the final set of full-year funding bills. A look at the Homeland Security Appropriations Act showcases how unpopular President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has become — and how few options Democrats have to force new constraints onto it.
The four bills included in the so-called minibus package come pre-negotiated between the House and Senate, helping smooth their passage through both chambers. In all, the bill would provide $64.4 billion in funding to DHS for the current fiscal year. As Senate Appropriations Committee vice chair Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wa., noted in her bill summary, that’s a $600 million overall decrease compared with last year.
The main hang-up in securing the bill’s passage has been wrangling over Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget. Given ICE’s multistate rampage over the past year, Democrats haven’t been keen on simply letting the status quo remain in place.
Last week, the Congressional Progressive Caucus came out with a list of demands for reforms — short of abolishing the agency — that would draw their support. On the other hand, Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, have been loath to add strings to ICE’s spending, which most GOP lawmakers would like see boosted again.
Many of the requirements set to be enacted seem easy to ignore for an administration that clearly regards Congress’ direct orders as guidelines at best.
The final bill appears to be a compromise between the two camps, with ICE’s annual funding remaining flat from last year at $10 billion. It also contains several provisions meant to constrain how Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spends this year’s budget. Rather than being ironclad handcuffs, though, the restraints on ICE’s conduct Congress seems set to impose are the flimsiest possible. Many of the proposed requirements seem as if they would easy to ignore for an administration that clearly regards Congress’ direct orders as guidelines at best.
For example, according to the joint explanatory statement the negotiators released Tuesday, in light of the First Amendment’s protections for recording government officials, the bill requires Noem to “ensure that all agents and officers are appropriately trained on the rights of individuals to record public operations.” It also provides $20 million for DHS to purchase and distribute body cameras to be worn when ICE or Customs and Border Protection are performing enforcement activities.
Both items sound good on paper, but given that these agents should already know about Americans’ civil rights — and seem unlikely to care if their actions are caught on camera — there’s not much to inspire a sense of relief from the people protesting ICE’s abuses.
The most flagrantly unhelpful example is a provision seemingly added in response to concerns about ICE and other law enforcement agencies conducting raids without any indication of which agencies are involved.
For months now, we’ve seen videos of men in masks and plain clothes swooping in to apprehend their targets from off the street. Demands that these agents go unmasked and wear clear identification were watered down substantially, according to the joint explanatory statement: “The agreement encourages DHS to develop and implement a standardized uniform policy for domestic law enforcement operations to ensure that law enforcement officers are clearly identifiable as Federal law enforcement.”
Admittedly, that’s probably about as good as one could expect during the Trump administration. As I noted last week, ICE received a massive surge in funding last year in the GOP’s reconciliation bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with very little guidance on how that money can be spent.
Accordingly, a large part of Murray’s summary is devoted to explaining why this bill is better than no bill at all:
Congress’ failure to pass a Homeland Security appropriations bill would not shut down ICE or CBP. A lapse in annual appropriations would instead allow ICE and CBP to continue their operations using OBBBA funds — but without any of the constraints imposed by an enacted funding bill — while [the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Transportation Security Administration, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], Coast Guard and other DHS components are shuttered, or working without pay.
Passing this full-year budget would add in new accountability measures, Murray argues, including monthly updates on how DHS is spending its windfall and restrictions on Noem’s ability to swap money between the department’s offices. It also would limit ICE to spending $3.8 billion of its annual budget on detention, rather than being able to simply dump the whole $10 billion into locking up immigrants.
It may be better than nothing, but that’s not exactly a heartening rallying cry ahead of the midterms. There will likely be enough votes to get it over the line in both chambers, but Senate Democratic leadership should not spend much time whipping support for this package of bills. Rather than spinning this as a victory, I’d much rather hear what a Democratic majority would do beyond providing ICE with training on why violating Americans’ rights is a bad thing.
