The House on Tuesday narrowly voted to take up Republicans’s $70 billion immigration enforcement bill, clearing a key hurdle to enacting the measure to fund President Trump’s deportation crackdown through the end of his term.
The vote was 213-211 along party lines, with every Democrat opposed. A final vote on the legislation, which if passed would go to Mr. Trump’s desk, was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
The action brought the Republican-controlled Congress one step closer to closing out a tempestuous and dysfunctional journey to steer around Democratic opposition to push through a multiyear bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Republicans did so using a maneuver that was never supposed to be employed for routine spending, after Democrats refused to fund the agencies unless changes were made after federal immigration officers fatally shot two Americans in Minneapolis.
But what began as a measure that unified Republicans eager to support Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration stance had devolved in recent weeks into a political albatross for the party, putting election-year divisions on display. G.O.P. lawmakers balked at the president’s demands to include $1 billion in security funds for his ballroom project, and they refused to move ahead with the measure without assurances that no federal money would be used to create a $1.8 billion fund his administration announced to pay people who claim they were victimized by the government.
While the administration said it would not move forward with such a fund, several Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to attach a prohibition or limitations to the bill. But those efforts failed, leaving the measure silent on the matter.
Still, Senate Republican leaders were able to put down the revolt in their ranks and pass the measure early Friday. And it appeared ready to sail through the more conservative House, where G.O.P. lawmakers have more readily deferred to Mr. Trump.
“Law enforcement finally has an administration who is willing to enforce the law again, but maintaining that progress requires more than strong leadership; it requires resources and it requires certainty,” said Representative Julie Fedorchak, Republican of North Dakota. “This bill does both and, more importantly, it sends a huge message that Congress stands with the men and women who serve on the front lines every single day.”
Republicans are pushing the legislation through Congress using a process known as reconciliation, created to allow the majority party to dodge a filibuster and pass bills aimed at tackling federal deficits on a simple majority vote. In doing so, they effectively gave up on the normal, bipartisan appropriations process that has always been used to fund major government agencies.
The circuitous dispute over funding for immigration enforcement began in February, when federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two American citizens during Mr. Trump’s immigration sweeps, and Democrats demanded guardrails to rein in the officers’ tactics and conduct.
Mr. Trump and Republicans refused to yield to a number of Democrats’s demands, including barring immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to obtain warrants for searches. Unable to reach a bipartisan agreement to allow a regular spending bill to move forward, Senate Republicans and Democrats struck a deal to fund everything except for the immigration enforcement agencies.
Even then, the deal languished for weeks because conservatives in the House refused to vote for a regular spending bill that did not fund ICE and border patrol. House Republicans passed it only after the White House ordered them to do so.
In the interim, Mr. Trump said he was funding both agencies with money approved by Republicans tucked into the tax law enacted last year, which also passed using under reconciliation.
Their use of a process meant to make it easier to do the politically risky work of enacting major budgetary policy to steer around normal appropriations has raised the specter of the maneuver becoming routine whenever lawmakers are unable to come to a consensus on spending.
“They’re using the partisan reconciliation process to pass a budget because they refused to negotiate through the normal appropriations process,” Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said. “We asked that ICE and C.B.P. be held to the same standards as every other responsible law enforcement agency in this country. Republicans said ‘no.’ They said no to everything.”
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