Politics

Senate Seeks $70,000,000,000 For ICE, CBP Operations As Shutdown Drags On

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Senate Republicans are seeking to push a large reconciliation bill focusing on funding immigration law enforcement operations as the partial government shutdown extends past the 65-day mark.

Republicans in the chamber, led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, unveiled a concurrent resolution, backed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, that requests $70 billion between 2026 and 2035 for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) operations.

“Republicans are doing something that must be done quickly, and that our Democrat colleagues are trying to prevent us from doing. That something is simple: fully fund Border Patrol and ICE at a time of great threat to the United States,” Graham told reporters. The senator recently came under fire for his staunch support of the Iran war and mockery for his late March trip to Disney World during the conflict.

At the same time, the House also signaled a willingness to expedite the reconciliation bill before voting on separate legislation to fully fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Senate-backed DHS funding bill, which excludes funding for ICE and CBP, has been in limbo since its early-morning passage on March 27. It was approved by unanimous consent with only five senators present, just hours before the Senate took a two-week vacation.

“The Senate is moving starting today on the scaled-down reconciliation bill to focus on ICE and CBP, and we’re going to expedite that when it comes over here,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told Bloomberg.

“The sequencing is important. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t isolate and, as I say, make an orphan out of key agencies of the department,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told The Hill. “And there’s some concern on our side that if you do the bulk of the department first before that, and they could be left out, we can’t allow for that.”

The Senate is expected to vote to adopt the budget sometime this week and only needs 51 votes to pass, according to Politico.

The DHS has been shut down since Feb. 14 following a standoff between Senate Democrats and Republicans over reforms for ICE following the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. Democrats sought to tag a list of changes to the agency and tie it to any funding for the DHS, including body cams, a ban on face masks and judicial warrants.

Johnson, who initially called the DHS funding bill passed in March a “joke” and slammed it as a “gambit,” announced earlier in April that he had worked with Thune to pursue the two-pronged approach to end the shutdown. The DHS secured $165 billion in appropriations through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in 2025, including funding to hire personnel and complete the wall at the southern border.

Other agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, have not been able to pay their staff on time. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on March 27 paying workers in airports, including back pay, during the shutdown.