WASHINGTON — After weeks of setbacks and delays, the Republican-controlled House on Tuesday narrowly passed a roughly $70 billion package to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
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The vote was 214-212. The package, dubbed the Secure America Act, cleared the Senate last week and now heads to the president’s desk for his expected signature.
The successful House vote ends months of drama and partisan bickering over immigration enforcement funding. In February, Senate Democrats voted to shut down the Department of Homeland Security after the fatal shootings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during immigration operations in Minneapolis the previous month.
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Some 75 days later, Congress passed a bill to end the DHS shutdown — the longest in U.S. history — and fund much of the sprawling federal agency, including the Coast Guard, FEMA, TSA and the Secret Service. But funding for ICE and Border Patrol was stripped out after Republicans rejected Democratic demands for immigration enforcement reforms, including requiring agents to wear mandatory body cameras and judicial warrants before entering homes.
Because of that impasse, Trump resorted to using other pots of money to temporarily pay those agents and officers.
The only way Trump and his congressional allies could fund ICE and Border Patrol was to use the reconciliation process, a fast-track budget procedure that allows Republicans to pass legislation with just 51 votes, bypassing Democrats and the usual 60-vote threshold in the Senate.
Trump threw a last-minute wrench into the process last month by demanding that a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund be inserted into the package. But Republicans in both the House and Senate revolted against the idea of possible taxpayer-funded payouts to Jan. 6 rioters, and administration officials were forced to scrap the plan. GOP leaders had to punt the reconciliation vote until after the Memorial Day recess due to the upheaval.
On Friday, the Senate voted 52-47 to pass the immigration enforcement funding, and the House followed suit. The package is designed to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the next three years.
House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said he believed Democrats were genuinely upset by the Good and Pretti killings but that shutting down agencies was not the right response.
“This is a terrible way to do business, and you know, it just tells me, for Senate Democrats, getting the majority is more important than running the country,” Cole told reporters before the vote. “This is not the appropriate way to express that. And frankly, if people have done something wrong, they need to be investigated and held to account.”
But Rep. Bennie Thompson, R-Miss., who will be chairman of the Homeland Security Committee if Democrats win back the House this fall, said his party was right to demand changes to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.
“We still stand on those principles, whether our Republican colleagues obviously believe in them or not, which obviously they don’t,” Thompson said in an interview. “The average man or woman on the street says that those things make sense … and Republicans are listening to Donald Trump, and only Donald Trump.”