U.S. Senate Republicans released a blueprint for their immigration enforcement funding bill Tuesday, paving the way to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, which has been shut down for 67 days.
The budget resolution directs the congressional Judiciary and Homeland Security committees to craft a budget reconciliation bill – a filibuster-proof vehicle for advancing federal spending – that pledges annual funds to ICE and U.S. Border Patrol for the next 3.5 years.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the advance funding, up to $140 billion, is “to prevent another reckless attempt by Democrats to defund law enforcement when we next take up appropriations.”
“I suspect our Democrat colleagues will cry ‘partisanship,"” Thune said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “Democrats – and Democrats alone – have made this process partisan. Republicans bent over backwards to work with them. But it was never enough, and we’ve run out of time to play the Democrats’ games.”
For months, Democratic lawmakers have refused to provide the votes necessary for Senate passage of the Homeland Security funding bill – the last remaining fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill – unless Republicans incorporated a laundry list of immigration enforcement restrictions.
Republican leaders finally determined that the only way to cleanly end the DHS shutdown was by splitting immigration enforcement funding from the Homeland Security bill, then passing that stripped funding, plus extra, separately via budget reconciliation.
The hybrid Homeland Security bill has already passed the Senate and only needs the House’s approval to reach the president’s desk.
“Here’s the irony of it: Democrats are going to get absolutely nothing for their dangerous game they played here,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Tuesday. “In the coming days, the House will be working closely with the Senate as they commence on that reconciliation process.”
Democrats and deficit watchdog groups condemned the budget resolution, the former for its lack of ICE and CBP reforms and the latter for its price tag.
“The budget process is already badly broken, and this resolution would make it worse by using reconciliation to sidestep the regular appropriations process and put even more spending on autopilot,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement.
“To make matters worse, this budget resolution allows twice as much spending as they say they need by allowing two different committees to each spend $70 billion, and it doesn’t require any offsets to finance the costs,” she added. “Lawmakers should be putting forward a real plan to govern and a real plan to improve the nation’s finances.”
