The House on Tuesday narrowly passed a $70 billion budget package, ending a four-month lapse in funding for immigration enforcement agencies and capping a fight that exposed tensions between President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
The package will now head to Trump’s desk to be signed into law.
The House voted 214-212 to pass the bill along party lines.
The bill funds two federal agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The money would fund the agencies through the end of Trump’s term bypassing the annual appropriations process, an unusual move that has allowed Republicans to avoid compromising with Democrats.
The bill’s passage is the culmination of a months-long fight over government funding. The standoff was triggered by the killing of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by federal agents in Minneapolis in January during protests against the administration’s deportation operations there. Democrats in Congress had refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE and CBP, unless Republicans agreed to impose new restrictions on federal agents.
The bill Republicans passed Tuesday includes none of those restrictions.
Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) initially voted against proceeding to a final vote on the bill Tuesday. They changed their votes after a conversation on the floor with leadership.
Burchett told The Washington Post that he sought reassurance from House leadership that they would bring a measure to codify Trump’s immigration policies into law. He signaled leadership agreed to bring a bill to the floor.
“We’ve run on those issues,” Burchett said. “We need to start following through with some stuff,” he added.
Roy, after the final vote, said he and GOP leadership had good conversations about a possible vote on the sweeping Republican immigration measure introduced during the last Congress.
That measure would codify into law some of Trump’s immigration priorities.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Michigan), chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, briefly held up the vote on final passage, but he flipped to approve the measure, after a brief discussion on the floor with Republican leaders.
The Senate passed the funding bill Friday, sending the measure to the House after weeks of delays driven by Republican disputes over issues largely unrelated to immigration funding — including money for security tied to Trump’s ballroom project and the Justice Department’s fund for those who claim they were wrongly prosecuted.
Those fights transformed what began as a relatively straightforward funding effort into a broader test of the president’s influence over congressional Republicans, forcing leadership into a difficult negotiating process to resolve the revolt.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania) was among those demanding that House GOP leadership ensure that the fund will not be allowed to continue in any shape. Fitzpatrick, alongside moderate Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi (New York), introduced legislation last month that would prohibit the use of federal money for payments made through the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-California), who caucuses with Republicans, voted against the funding package. Before the vote Tuesday, he said he had concerns about going around the annual appropriations process and “wouldn’t even consider voting yes” unless there were bipartisan reforms to immigration enforcement in the interior of the country.
Democrats did not support the ICE funding package, as House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (Massachusetts) told the House Rules Committee on Monday that Congress should not be appropriating more money for the agency.
“We have 60 percent of American families who are struggling to afford the basics and today, we are being asked to come back and say, ‘another $70 billion for ICE,’” Clark said.
While Congress funded the rest of the Department of Homeland Security through September, Republicans opted to use the budget reconciliation process to fund ICE and CBP through fiscal year 2029. The process allows Republicans to advance the measure with a simple majority in the Senate, avoiding the filibuster and forgoing Democratic support.
The legislation is particularly unusual because it is the first time reconciliation is being used to bypass the normal annual appropriations process and fund government agencies for multiple years in an effort to avoid future shutdowns.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said Monday that using reconciliation to fund the agencies sets a “very dangerous precedent.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), chair of the Appropriations Committee, said that although he is “very reluctant” to use the reconciliation process to pass the immigration enforcement funding, he does not believe it will become normalized in the future.
“I blame the Senate Democrats in particular, and frankly, the Senate in general for letting the filibuster to be misused,” Cole said in an interview Tuesday. “But we’re not going to move to moving appropriations bills through reconciliation as a regular process. It’s not going to happen.”
correctionA previous version of this article incorrectly said that Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) was among a group of lawmakers involved in an animated debate on the House floor.
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