WASHINGTON — The window closed this week for Congress to reform how federal immigration agents operate as Republicans assembled party-line legislation to fund the Trump administration’s mass deportation objectives.
The multipart legislation will provide $71.1 billion for immigration agencies for the rest of Donald Trump’s second presidential term – money atop the roughly $171 billion the Republican-majority Congress allocated for immigration- and border-enforcement efforts last year using a maneuver called budget reconciliation.
“They’re going to use this reconciliation process to get around … so they don’t have to do anything,” Rep. Herb Conaway (D-3rd) said in an interview last week. “We’re not going to help them not do the reforms.”
The latest chance to reform immigration policies evaporated last week as Congress passed and Trump signed legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which had lacked funding through the regular appropriations process for 76 days. After that bill passed, any leverage Democrats held to empower them to force changes slipped away.
“Democrats got absolutely nothing for their political charades and shenanigans,” Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who sets the legislative agenda in the House, told reporters after passage.
Roxbury warehouse
After federal immigration agents in Minnesota shot and killed two U.S. citizens in January, Democrats issued demands for how Homeland Security personnel interact with the public.
They wanted the use of body cameras, judge-signed warrants and a ban on racial profiling, among other steps. Five months later, Democrats are walking away empty-handed as Republicans back the administration, locked in a buildout of immigration detention sites like a warehouse in Roxbury Township, in Morris County.
In interviews with NJ Spotlight News, Conaway and Reps. LaMonica McIver (D-10th) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th) said they would not support two agencies that they view as rogue actors: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
“When Republicans say yes to money for them they are basically co-signing that it’s OK to kill American citizens and treat people wrongly,” McIver said.
Republicans are not interested in changing how the agencies run, she said. “They don’t care about reforms, obviously. They’re OK with them operating unlawfully and indecent and ineffective. That’s on Republicans.”
A federal case is proceeding against McIver, who represents Newark, over her involvement in a physical scuffle last year outside Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center.
‘Afraid of the president’
Watson Coleman said Trump, who at a 2023 campaign rally said immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, has cowed Republicans into submission to the extent that they’re not open to reforms.
“From the Republican side, they’ve been very clear that they’re afraid of the president,” Watson Coleman said. “So they won’t consider logical reform measures that are just ensuring that ICE is operating legally and that ICE is operating with dignity and respect.”
Under those conditions, there is no clear path toward reform, she said. “I don’t know how we get there, and that’s sad for this country.”
Republicans are writing this second bill in a process that could conclude in weeks and that will not be subject to a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Meanwhile, the administration is using that larger pot of funding to hire immigration agents and expand the U.S. government’s deportation footprint, including by purchasing and altering warehouses.
New Jersey and Roxbury sued in federal court to block the U.S. government from using that warehouse as an ICE detention site.
Court papers filed this week show the government is considering a “caretaker contractor” to start work on the site this month.
“The agency does not expect soil disturbances under the caretaker contract beyond potentially pegging the fence sections to the ground with something like a tent stake,” Krystal-Rose Perez, a federal attorney, said in an email sent March 30.
The new round of funding, which Republicans want to spread through Trump’s second term, includes about $38.2 billion for ICE and roughly $26 billion for Customs and Border Protection. Those sums dwarf the regular budgets of ICE and CBP, which before Trump’s second term hovered around $10 billion and $17 billion, respectively.
$1 billion ballroom
Other funding in the legislation that Republicans are piecing together includes $1 billion for a White House ballroom, a vanity project Trump created after he ordered the East Wing’s destruction.
South Dakota Republican John Thune, the Senate leader, last week said he expects the full chamber to vote on the package before the month is out. The legislation must also receive a full House vote before it can become law.
Conaway said he thinks the public grasps Democrats want to reform ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
“I think people understand that the Democratic Party is fighting for civil rights, for humanism in our policy toward immigrants, understand that we’re an immigrant nation,” Conaway said. “And most Americans don’t believe people should be beaten up on the streets, citizens often, just because of the color of their skin or the accent they have.”
In one legislative win for Democrats, Conaway and Rep. Donald Norcross (D-1st) folded language into a defense bill that will require the Pentagon to share information about how the U.S. government is using military bases for immigration policy. That bill became law.
But on forcing changes for day-to-day operations, Democrats, who lack majorities in either chamber, have largely come up short in talks with the Republican majority.
“We’re asking for routine things that are commonly available to jurisdictions all over the country, and we cannot get them to agree with what they know is the right thing, and that’s sad,” Conaway said.
