House Republicans on Tuesday approved a $70bn bill funding through the duration of his term the agencies leading Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, ending a months-long standoff with Democrats that at one point forced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to shutter.
The Secure America Act passed in a 214-212 vote that was largely along party lines, with Kevin Kiley, an independent who aligns with the Republicans, joining all Democrats in voting no. The Senate approved the measure last week, which allocates $38bn to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), $26bn to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and $5bn more to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through September 2029. The legislation now awaits Trump’s signature.
“With today’s vote, House and Senate Republicans have officially ended the third Democrat government shutdown of this Congress,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said following the measure’s passage.
“All that Democrats have achieved by their shutdown is a useful reminder to the American people of their support for open borders and keeping criminal illegal immigrants in American communities – policies that have been soundly rejected by the American people over and over again. We hope this episode serves as a future reminder to Democrats that when they shut the government down, they will receive less than nothing in return.”
The bill ends a blockade of funding for the agencies, which Democrats announced in January after federal agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis amid an intensive campaign billed as rooting out undocumented immigrants. Their boycott – and fruitless effort to negotiate reforms to federal immigration enforcement operations – halted passage of a measure that authorized spending by the entirety of the DHS, forcing it to shut down for 75 days from mid-February.
The department reopened at the end of April after Democrats agreed to support legislation that paid for all of its operations excluding ICE and CBP, while Republicans then moved to approve funding for those agencies through the duration of Trump’s presidency, saying it was necessary to prevent Democrats from shutting down the DHS again.
House Democrats unanimously opposed the bill, with Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, saying it would “waste $70bn in taxpayer money to give a blank check to ICE without any guardrails, any oversight, any accountability”.
Republicans countered by accusing Democrats of trying to “defund the police” and allow undocumented immigrants to enter the country.
“Make no mistake, you’re voting yes, you’re not only voting to secure America’s borders, you’re voting to fund law enforcement,” the House majority leader, Steve Scalise, said of the bill’s supporters. “You vote no, you are voting to defund the police. Those are the people, the law enforcement officers, risking their lives to keep our community safe.”
The bill’s passage is an accomplishment for Johnson, who is managing a historically slim Republican majority, and for Trump, whose attempt to create a nearly $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund that would pay out his allies loomed over the bill as it made its way through Congress.
Shortly before the act’s passage in the House, GOP lawmakers voted down an attempt by Democrats to insert language that would have blocked the government from issuing financial settlements to anyone convicted of assaulting a police officer during the January 6 insurrection. And as the bill was being considered by the Senate last week, a small group of Republicans also sought to find bipartisan compromise on an amendment that would bar the “anti-weaponization” fund, without success.
The proposal nonetheless remains an issue for some congressional Republicans, even though the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told a House committee last week that the proposal was dead. In an interview broadcast on Sunday, the president again refused to rule out its creation.
The spending legislation was also delayed by uproar over an attempt to include $1bn for security improvements related to the ballroom Trump is building at the White House. Senate Republicans eventually agreed to remove those funds, after the chamber’s parliamentarian ruled the measure could not be included if the bill was to pass using the budget reconciliation procedure to circumvent the Democratic filibuster.
