WASHINGTON — Federal immigration enforcement agencies may soon receive tens of billions of dollars from Congress, a significant injection of cash after Republican lawmakers already gave them years’ worth of funding.
In a budget blueprint released Tuesday, Senate Republicans proposed as much as $140 billion in new funding in a package for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the two agencies spearheading President Trump’s immigrant crackdown. That figure is not final and members will debate what is funded and by how much this month and next.
The bill would fund “Border Patrol and ICE for 3.5 years, which will carry us through the Trump presidency,” Lindsey Graham, the Senate Republican leading the legislation, said Tuesday afternoon. Trump has set a self-imposed June 1 deadline for Congress to send the bill to the White House for his signature.
By a 52-46 vote, the Senate voted Tuesday night on a procedural measure to advance the broader bill. New Jersey Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, voted against.
Armed with a first round of funding, the Trump administration has built out a national apparatus to conduct mass arrests and deportations, including infrastructure in New Jersey, where ICE purchased a warehouse. Now the number of people detained at the state’s largest detention site, in Elizabeth, has tripled and the military wants to use a Burlington County base to hold and deport people.
On April 7, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport filed a lawsuit to block the use of the warehouse in Roxbury, in Morris County.
“If the project were to proceed, it would impose profound burdens on local infrastructure and public resources from a facility that would house as many as 1,500 detainees and be staffed by 1,000 employees, in an area not zoned for large-scale human occupancy,” Davenport said in a statement. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE “failed to comply with federal laws requiring them to consult with state and local government officials and fully assess a project’s impacts on the environment and local resources.”
Republicans, using a method known as budget reconciliation, will be able to pass the legislation unveiled Tuesday without any votes from Democrats.
They must walk a narrow path, though, to get there. As of Tuesday afternoon, following the swearing-in of Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-11th) and the resignation of a Florida Democrat, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Republicans can afford to lose two members on a given vote.
Circulating separately is a push to remove Florida Republican Cory Mills from Congress for alleged sexual abuse and campaign finance violations. Mills denies wrongdoing.
Credit: (NJ Office of the Attorney General)The Roxbury site would be the largest ICE facility in the state and among the largest on the East Coast if it houses the 1,500 people planned by the Trump administration. Occupancy at New Jersey’s two full detention sites, Delaney Hall in Newark and the Elizabeth facility, spiked in the fall as the administration hired waves of immigration agents.
After the lethal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Democrats have pushed for reforms to how immigration officers operate in public.
“We are going to take a very strong position on bringing protections to the American people,” Rep. Herb Conaway (D-3rd) told NJ Spotlight News in January.
Democrats, the House and Senate minority, have used the federal appropriations process to push for reforms and have come up empty.
Senate Republican leader John Thune of South Dakota said Tuesday, after the budget plan was published, that Congress will “be funding these two important agencies.”
“What did Democrats get out of all of these shutdowns?” Thune asked.
Defunding ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol, as immigration advocacy groups are demanding, is effectively impossible in this Congress. The Congress allocated about $130 billion for the Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda under a party-line bill that became law in the summer. Under that law, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol have enough funding to operate for years without additional money.
“Senator Booker does not support another dollar amount for an unaccountable and reckless ICE agency,” a Booker staffer said in an emailed statement to NJ Spotlight News. “He believes this administration should be focusing on lower costs for New Jerseyans, not sending more tax dollars with no reforms to a rogue agency that already has more money than the combined military budgets of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.”
Democrats will try to amend the overall bill when the Senate debates this week, though those changes are likely to be voted down, because Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the chamber.
