Republicans Set To Kick Off Fraught Budget Process for ICE, Border Patrol

Republicans on Capitol Hill are set to kick off the process for funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection this week, but several conservatives have made it clear they are going to make it as difficult as possible. Unlike with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, no tax cuts are included in the legislation to incentivize hardliners to get on board. Since Senate Democrats began blocking funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol back in February, Republicans have insisted that they would not cave on demands like requiring warrants when agents enter homes or ensuring agents identify themselves to the public. Now that Congress has reopened all parts of the Department of Homeland Security except for ICE removals and Border Patrol operations, Republican leaders are hoping that the reconciliation process will prove useful. “Republicans have tried repeatedly … to ensure that the department and all the agencies and all the employees and all the functions are funded,” Senator John Thune said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Now, we’re gonna fund those agencies for three years into the future.”Reconciliation takes much longer than simply putting a continuing resolution on the floor in order to reopen a department or agency. Under reconciliation, both the House and Senate must pass a budget “instruction” resolution, designating committees to begin marking up budgets for certain agencies. Once those budgets are written, then the two chambers can pass the legislation by simple majority. Typically, when Congress is trying to fund an agency that has been shut down, a simple extension can be passed through a continuing resolution, which can take just a matter of hours while the multi-step budget reconciliation process typically takes a number of weeks. Two problems are immediately apparent, however. One, Speaker Mike Johnson has the narrowest House majority in a century, with the ability to lose only one Republican on a party-line vote in his chamber. The second issue is that Senator Rand Paul — the libertarian from Kentucky — leads the Senate committee which will be charged with writing the new ICE and CBP budgets. “The White House has been involved in all these conversations,” Mr. Thune said when asked if he and Mr. Johnson are aligned as they begin this fight. “I don’t speak for the House or how they do things. We have our own unique challenges here in the Senate.”The budget instructions resolution is expected to come out of the Senate Budget Committee this week and receive a vote on the floor before going over to the House. Last year, the instructions for what would eventually become the One Big Beautiful Bill Act became especially contentious after House conservatives accused senators of trying to get away with not cutting enough spending, thus adding trillions to the national debt. Senator Rick Scott, a conservative lawmaker from Florida, raised those concerns last month. When asked by The New York Sun if he believed the reconciliation process is a viable path to fund the immigration enforcement agencies, Mr. Scott did not sound particularly enthusiastic. “I think it’s gonna be very hard. We watched the reconciliation process last year with the big beautiful bill, and it ended up being a train where everybody put all of their ideas on there,” Mr. Scott said. “It’s not a bill that, you know — I like the tax cuts, but the rest of it, you know, it was pretty frustrating.”Dr. Paul, another fiscal hawk, could also throw a wrench in the process should he so choose. As chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, he will oversee the process of completing the budget markup for ICE and Border Patrol once the instructions pass through both chambers. Were he to vote against it in the committee, and all Democrats vote no, then the bill would not pass or be sent for a full Senate vote. Dr. Paul was one of only three Republican senators to vote no on the One Big Beautiful Bill, citing the increase in the debt limit which was included in that legislation. He has admitted that he may have presidential ambitions to run as a free trade, free markets kind of conservative, which he says is not represented in the party nowadays. “On many days it’s me in the Senate, the only one left for free trade,” Dr. Paul told CBS News last month. “If you combine (the libertarian vote) with the Chamber of Commerce and the traditional business community that doesn’t like protectionism, there may be a force out there for a different direction for the party other than being continued to be led by populism.”

Republicans Set To Kick Off Fraught Budget Process for ICE, Border Patrol

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