Inside the other ICE funding fight Democrats are waging
By Michael Jones
Senate Democrats returned to Washington this week from a week-long recess united against advancing an appropriations bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of September, following the horrifying killing in broad daylight of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last Saturday.
But beyond the immediate DHS funding fight lies a deeper question congressional Democrats have been exploring: Whether they can—and should—try to claw back the Immigration and Customs Enforcement resources Republicans enacted last summer in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“It’s important to understand that a lot of the funding that’s being unleashed on the American people in such extreme ways right now was provided not through the traditional appropriations process, but in connection with the One Big Ugly Bill that every single Democrat opposed—every single one of us—and that Donald Trump and Republicans jammed down the throats of the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told me earlier this month. “And so the funding dynamic that we have to navigate as it relates to ICE’s out-of-control behavior is different in nature than what may have otherwise been the case, and that’s something that we’ll collectively be working on as our discussions continue.”
Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) this week accused Republicans of cutting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a blank check for DHS to bankroll the brutality communities like Minneapolis have endured at the hands of the Trump administration.
“Republicans voted for that unprecedented funding with no oversight, no accountability, which has now resulted in federal officers and agents first killing a mother in her minivan trying to drive away, and now has led to a legal gun owner with a legal right to conceal and carry being killed and slandered as a terrorist by this administration,” Murray said of Renee Good and Pretti. “Republicans voted to put federal agents in the streets with barely any training who are not focused on de-escalation, not wearing body cameras and explicitly not working with local law enforcement and officials, all of which makes our communities less safe.”
The huge reconciliation package Republicans passed on a party-line vote last summer dramatically increased funding for immigration enforcement. According to multiple budget analyses, the OBBBA provided roughly $170 billion over four years to immigration and border enforcement agencies, with ICE and CBP as the largest beneficiaries. Within that total, ICE alone was allocated about $75 billion over the multi-year period — including roughly $45 billion to expand detention capacity and about $30 billion for ICE operational and enforcement costs.
This funding, as Jeffries argued, isn’t subject to the normal annual appropriations process in the same way other agency budgets are. It’s far larger and more flexible than past practice, and a chunk of it is in accounts that can be spent across fiscal years.
Critics say this means that even if Congress tries to use its power of the purse to rein in ICE’s activities—for example, by opposing a DHS appropriations bill—that big, carry-forward pot of financing would still let enforcement actions continue much as before. That’s a real concern in the context of the aggressive immigration enforcement and deadly federal agent shootings in Minneapolis that have sparked protests and political backlash.
Republicans defend the influx of DHS money with claims that the border and interior enforcement apparatus had been deliberately weakened under prior Democratic administrations and that ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol were operating with insufficient resources to detain, remove, and monitor migrants at scale. In other words, one-year appropriations weren’t enough; the problem was too large and too immediate. OBBBA was sold as a way to surge capacity—beds, officers, transportation, contracts—quickly and decisively.
Perhaps more importantly, the GOP wanted to make the funding durable and insulated from future Democratic control. Republicans openly worried that even though they won the White House and Congress in 2024, they could lose one or both chambers this cycle. By front-loading DHS funding into a reconciliation bill, they could lock in multi-year resources, shield ICE from annual appropriations fights, and blunt Democrats’ ability to use shutdown threats or riders to constrain enforcement.
It’s fair to ask, then, why Democrats believe it’s important to oppose the DHS bill when ICE is already funded. Even if Democrats succeed in tightening DHS language or forcing a partial shutdown, ICE’s operations would likely continue largely uninterrupted, which raises questions about how much leverage Congress actually has over immigration in Trump 2.0—and why Democrats need more political power to fix many of the problems they say were created by the OBBBA.
But senators contend that the constituent outreach stories they’re hearing after the Pretti shooting can’t be ignored—even if Democrats are in the minority party.
“People have said to me nonstop that something must be done and we have to add these conditions to the bill,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said this week. “We need to do whatever we can and use any tool available. That’s what we’re determined to do.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
