ICE Funding Fight Moves From the House to the Senate

Seven Democrats defy their party’s efforts to cripple illegal alien removal operations.

Funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and especially for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seemed to have brought congressional Republicans and Democrats to a stalemate as of January 21. But on the following day, a $1.2 trillion spending package advanced through the House by a narrow margin. Nothing is settled yet, though. The package, made up of four appropriations bills, now moves to the Senate.

Two spending packages were at the center of intense negotiations but squeezed through a procedural vote, known as a “rule vote,” 214-213. This cleared the way for final debate and consideration on the House floor. One of the packages comprised three bills covering the Health and Human Services, Labor, and War Departments. The other was for the DHS. Funding for ICE has been a sticking point, since many Democrats wanted significant budget cuts to the agency at the center of the illegal alien deportation battle playing out across the country.

Republicans had conceded to several Democrat demands concerning ICE. Provisions in the bill require ICE agents to wear body cams and to attend additional training on how to deal with the public. The agency’s funding for “removal activities” is reduced in the contentious bill, though numerous Democrats are still not satisfied, and it was unclear how many of them would support the bill in a final vote.

ICE Funding Survives the House

As it turned out, late in the afternoon of January 22, seven House Democrats broke with party leadership to help Republicans move the bill to the upper chamber. One GOP representative, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted no. A fiscal hawk, Massie often unapologetically bucks his party over what he considers wasteful or misdirected spending. The final tally was 220-207.

The Senate will vote on the package next week. If it passes, Congress would have achieved the rare feat, these days, of getting all 12 appropriations bills to fund the government finalized before the fiscal deadline and avoiding what seems to have become the routine temporary fix of a continuing resolution to keep the lights on in DC.

The moment Republicans gave Democrats most of what they wanted, in terms of ICE conditions, the latter were in a tough spot. It was clear that no one on Capitol Hill had the stomach for another government shutdown, which was looming at the end of January.

On the other hand, the hardcore progressive activists on the left are not going to be thrilled. If the Senate approves this spending package, Democrats would have effectively given the green light for ICE to continue the operations that have led to protests – some of them violent – in several major cities around the country.

Getting any legislation through Congress is a matter of compromising when the balance of power is almost even. While conservatives have for decades lamented Republicans’ willingness to give away the farm for the sake of a deal, progressives in the era of President Donald Trump seem hostile to any thought of ceding an inch of legislative ground to the GOP.

Within the halls of Congress, though, even many far-left progressive lawmakers will bend if they believe a small battle is worth losing if it means winning the political war. Some of the party’s more progressive lawmakers had distanced themselves from calls to abolish ICE altogether.

Senate Democrats’ Dilemma

Several Senate Democrats are still not on board, however, and so this final piece of the government funding jigsaw is not home free.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), for one, is set to vote no. “Democrats have no obligation to support a bill that not only funds the dystopian scenes we are seeing in Minneapolis,” Murphy said in a statement, “but will allow DHS to replicate that playbook of brutality in cities all over this country.”

Left-wing activists are escalating physical confrontations with ICE agents, particularly in Minneapolis, MN. When one of them was shot and killed by an ICE agent as she appeared to strike him deliberately with her SUV, tensions rose quickly. Senate Democrats now perhaps find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They can pander to those activists by blocking this one remaining spending package, thus holding up funding for ICE, but, in doing so, they could end up being blamed – again – for a government shutdown.

Given that ICE has the money, for the time being, to continue its operations unhindered – regardless of next week’s vote – those Democrats are unlikely to go that route.