United States President Donald Trump has signed into law a $70bn funding bill for immigration enforcement, capping a months-long standoff with Democrats after the killing of two US citizens.
The legislation signed into law on Wednesday provides funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for at least the remainder of Trump’s term.
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That adds to a $140bn financial windfall the agencies received as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a tax-and-spending bill Congress passed last July.
Both ICE and CBP fall under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In an Oval Office signing ceremony, Trump accused the Democrats of nefarious motives for seeking to block DHS funding.
“Congressional Democrats tried to block all funding for the Department of Homeland Security in a reprehensible attempt to throw open the borders of the United States of America,” Trump said. “They want to drag us straight back to chaos and crime.”
Immigration had dominated Trump’s re-election campaign, and the Republican leader returned to office for a second term on a pledge to undertake a mass deportation campaign.
Despite initially saying his administration would only target criminal offenders, the strategy quickly expanded to target individuals without criminal records.
Immigration advocates have accused the administration of using “dragnet” techniques to boost detention numbers, while rolling back legal protections for foreign nationals to increase the deportable population.
The first nine months of Trump’s second term saw an 11-fold increase in ICE street arrests, compared with the final months of President Joe Biden’s presidency, according to the Legal Defense Fund, an advocacy group.
That included a seven-fold increase in people arrested who had no prior criminal convictions.
Rights groups have accused ICE and CBP of using racial profiling, excessive violence and unconstitutional tactics to boost detentions. Those tactics include warrantless house searches and barring immigrants from using their due process rights.
The Trump administration, however, has rejected those claims.
Political standoff
Despite the criticism, Democratic leadership initially supported the $70bn funding bill, which is set to allow both ICE and CBP to further grow their ranks.
But the party changed course following the killings of two US citizens in January: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They were shot dead as part of an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, called Operation Metro Surge.
In the aftermath of those killings, Democrats pledged to oppose any new immigration enforcement funding if such legislation did not include safeguards on officer conduct.
The standoff led to an impasse over whether to approve any DHS funding at all.
With the funding legislation held up in Congress, the department was forced to shut down nonessential operations for 76 days, leading to staffing struggles among its agencies, most notably the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Lawmakers eventually separated funding for ICE and CBP from legislation to finance DHS’s other agencies. The latter was approved in April. But Democrats continued to block a new funding bill for ICE and CBP.
In the end, Wednesday’s $70bn legislation only passed after Republicans pursued a weeks-long “budget reconciliation” process, which allowed them to pass the bill with a simple majority in the Senate, as opposed to the 60 votes typically needed to overcome a filibuster.
Republicans currently hold 53 seats in the 100-member chamber. They also hold a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, which also passed the legislation on Tuesday.
Murad Awawdeh, the president of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an immigrant rights nonprofit, was among the leaders who condemned the new funding.
“This taxpayer-funded windfall is built on the false premise that scapegoating and targeting immigrants will improve public safety or improve the lives of millions of Americans,” he said in a statement.
He said the funding will “destabilise communities, separate families, and give ICE a license to return to the lawless and violent actions we saw in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and around the country”.
