Early Friday morning, the Senate finally managed to pass a bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies, bringing a four-month clash with Democrats over sending money to the agencies one step closer to conclusion.
The bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies became a major political flash point as Republicans rebuffed President Donald Trump on multiple and often unrelated issues — including his East Wing ballroom project and the Justice Department’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — underscoring sharp strains within the party.
While congressional Republicans largely unified around funding immigration enforcement, they refused to concede to some of Trump’s signature priorities, in one of the most overt displays of resistance to his agenda since he returned to office. The bill must still go to the House.
Here are five key takeaways from this grueling week on Capitol Hill.
Trump’s grip on Senate Republicans may be loosening
There is a growing cohort of Republican senators willing to buck Trump.
For years, moderate Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) have challenged Trump on significant legislative issues and his controversial nominations. But they were joined by a number of other Republicans who voted without success to put limits on the Trump administration during the 18-hour vote-a-rama on the immigration enforcement package.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who has publicly clashed with the Trump administration, offered an amendment to block the Justice Department’s payout fund. The measure gained the support of 12 GOP senators but failed to get enough votes to advance.
Senators who lost their reelection primaries after Trump endorsed their opponents also seemed more willing to take a stand against the administration.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) was among the 12 GOP senators to support Tillis’s amendment. He lost his Republican primary runoff contest last month after Trump endorsed his opponent.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who also lost his reelection contest against Trump-aligned candidates, offered several amendments aimed at Trump administration policies, including his own measure that would have directed money to law enforcement officers who were targeted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the former Senate Republican leader who once spearheaded Trump’s agenda in the chamber but has since fallen out with the president, opposed adding a controversial election overhaul bill to the package, which Trump has pushed Congress to pass. The “SAVE America Act” would impose stricter federal voting laws, including a new requirement to provide documented proof of citizenship and a photo ID.
This group of senators could prove to be a thorn in Trump’s side over the next few months as Congress tries to get priorities across the finish line ahead of midterms.
Vulnerable Republicans had to take difficult votes
Vulnerable Senate Republicans were forced to take tough votes on Democratic-led amendments against some of Trump’s controversial priorities. And in other cases, they supported Republican-backed amendments to avoid the risk of alienating swing voters.
Collins is the only Republican in the Senate who represents a state that former vice president Kamala Harris carried in 2024 and is considered the most vulnerable Senate Republican up for reelection in November. She was very vocal in her opposition to the Justice Department’s payout fund, and supported a Democratic amendment to send the immigration enforcement package back to the committee to add language addressing the fund in the bill.
She also voted against the “SAVE America Act” amendment.
Both Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), who is in a tough race against former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who is also in a competitive election, supported the Democratic amendment to send the reconciliation bill back to the committee.
None of the amendment motions were successful, and every Republican except Murkowski supported final passage of the funding package. But vulnerable lawmakers took the opportunity to flag their stance on issues that could help them garner votes this fall. .
Trump doesn’t get his ballroom security funding
The Trump administration had sought $1 billion for extra security related to the East Wing construction project, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) acknowledged some GOP senators did not want included in the bill.
Congressional Republicans worked to distance the proposed funding from the controversial ballroom renovation itself. But the White House argued that if Congress funds the security request, that would serve as legal authorization for the project, which a federal judge has said requires congressional approval.
The funding ultimately was stripped from the package before it came to the Senate floor.
Seven Republican senators, including Collins, Murkowski, Cassidy, Tillis, Husted and Sullivan, voted to advance a Democratic-led amendment to block the project altogether. However, the motion failed to garner enough support.
Lawmakers failed to block the payout fund
Last month, Republicans revolted over the controversial fund set up by the administration to pay people who claim they were wrongly prosecuted. The angry pushback from many Republican senators prevented the Senate from taking upthe spending package for a week.
Several Senate Republicans publicly railed against the fund, especially about who the money would benefit — including possibly those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
During the vote-a-rama, the Senate voted seven times on measures to rein in, block or modify the fund. None of the measures passed, but the one proposed by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) came pretty close and held up progress for three hours. There were even more amendments proposed that didn’t get a vote.
There were even more amendments proposed on the fund that didn’t get a vote.
Senate Republican leadership resisted demands to address the payout fund in the bill after the Justice Department pledged to abandon the fund.
Still, Trump himself has not said it’s dead. Just a day after acting attorney general Todd Blanche testified that the administration was abandoning the payout fund, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he didn’t know whether the fund was dead and spoke about his “love” for the idea. So Congress could wrestle with this again.
Republicans are funding controversial agencies past Trump’s term
Republicans chose to use the fast-tracking budget tool known as reconciliation to fund two agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, past the end of Trump’s term.
The process allowed Republicans to advance the immigration enforcement funding with fewer votes to avoid a filibuster, forgoing Democratic support.
What is particularly unusual about this appropriation is the timing. Republicans are extending funding for ICE and CBP past the end of Trump’s term in 2029. This is the first time reconciliation has been used to completely replace an agency’s normal annual appropriations and provide funding for multiple years, in an effort to avoid future shutdowns and political brawls.
This could set a new precedent for either party to use the fast-track budget process to fund agencies in the future without going through the traditional bipartisan negotiation process.
Murkowski, the sole Republican to vote against final passage of the immigration enforcement package, said in a statement on X on Friday that while she supports funding to “secure our borders and protect the homeland,” she did not want to bypass the normal appropriations process.
“By choosing to appropriate funding for three fiscal years instead of one, this measure weakens the normal budgeting process and sets another precedent for avoiding it when we find ourselves in disagreement,” she wrote. “In doing so, it reduces Congress’ ability to apply reasonable checks on immigration policy for the remainder of this administration and into the next.”
Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.
The post 5 takeaways from the grueling Senate funding battle that just ended appeared first on Washington Post.
