President Donald Trump signed a $70 billion package that fully funds immigration enforcement for the rest of his term, capping off a fight with dissident Republicans over a payout fund for political allies.
The House sent the spending bill to his desk without provisions initially sought by some Republican lawmakers to ban payouts along the lines laid out in the proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund the administration announced last month. The Justice Department has pulled back from that plan after a political backlash, but Trump has expressed interest in keeping it alive.
The episode underscored Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party, even as cracks have emerged as the president’s approval ratings sink ahead of the November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. The spending package, already approved by the Senate, contains billions for Trump to carry out his mass deportation agenda.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Border Patrol agents will now receive “the support and resources they need to defend our borders, protect our homeland, and to keep America safe,” Trump said Wednesday during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office.
The measure’s passage ended a months-long partisan impasse over the Department of Homeland Security, spurred by the killings of two US citizens by immigration enforcement agents during protests earlier this year in Minnesota. Democrats had demanded changes to ICE tactics in exchange for their votes to fund the agency under normal appropriations. The GOP refused to agree to such changes.
The funding clash in Congress led to the longest partial government shutdown in history. The agency reopened in April, but Trump has been forced to pay for immigration enforcement through alternative funds while he waited for lawmakers to approve the new funds.
Trump said Democrats “tried to block all funding for the Department of Homeland Security in a reprehensible attempt to throw open the borders of the United States of America” but declared “we’re not going to let them do that.”
The legislative process was further complicated in recent weeks, when some Republican lawmakers attempted to leverage the bill to stop the president from proceeding with plans to establish a legal fund to pay out purported victims of alleged government “weaponization.” The effort was derided by critics — including some in Trump’s own party — as a slush fund for political allies.
The retribution fund was created as part of the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2019 leak of the president’s tax information to the New York Times. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche last week told lawmakers in a congressional hearing that the administration would drop its plans for the fund. Yet Trump has said that he still supports the idea and is open to reviving it despite the backlash from Republicans.
Detention Centers
Passage of the multibillion immigration package also removes a potential source of leverage for Democrats over administration plans to expand detention centers.
Trump’s tax bill passed last year included $45 billion to build detention centers. DHS has been working to consolidate its detention network from more than 200 mostly contract jails to about 35 primarily government-owned and contract-operated jails occupying converted warehouses.
Among the contract winners are private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic. Shares of those companies rose more than 20% over the past month as the odds improved that the spending package would pass.