Republicans are set to use their biggest pre-midterm election messaging vehicle on one of their narrowest priorities yet: a party-line spending bill focused on immigration enforcement after Democrats forced their hand in a bruising standoff.
The move is expected to eat up valuable floor time in Congress, squeezing Republicans’ ability to pass election-year priorities before November, including tax cuts, broader spending packages, and a separate bill to fund the Iran conflict.
The House is only scheduled to be in session for roughly 60 days between the start of April and Election Day on November 3. The Senate, meanwhile, will only be in session for 78 days. Both chambers are out most of August and October.
The narrow immigration funding package is set to take up nearly a quarter of the time Congress is set to be in Washington, and that’s only if reconciliation gets done by President Donald Trump’s June 1 deadline.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters Thursday that there would be “unanimity” around getting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection funded through a party-line tax and spending process known as budget reconciliation.
“Our theory of the case behind all this was to keep that thing as narrow and focused as possible — and that maximizes, I think, the speed at which we can do it and the support for it, so you know, there will probably be some attempts to add things,” Thune said. “There are things out there that obviously many of us are interested in, but I’m not sure how, on a reconciliation vehicle like this, that we need to kind of move with haste, as the president has pointed out.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has been one of the biggest supporters of another reconciliation bill, agrees with Thune’s approach of keeping the legislation narrow.
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Both CBP and ICE are currently funded by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was passed using reconciliation last year. The immigration agencies, however, have come under fire from Democrats following January’s killings of two U.S. citizens by immigration enforcement officers in Minneapolis.
Democrats have cited the shootings in refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security unless reforms to ICE, including bans on agents wearing masks, are passed by Congress. The dispute has led to most of DHS, excluding ICE, being shut down for more than 40 days.
Thune and Johnson have agreed to end the shutdown by passing a bill funding everything at DHS, except for ICE and CBP, which will be instead funded via reconciliation.
“We are going forward to fund our incredible ICE Agents and Border Patrol through a process that doesn’t need Radical Left Democrat votes, and bypasses the Senate Filibuster (which should be repealed, IMMEDIATELY!), working in close conjunction with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Leader John Thune,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
Although Democrats are not expected to pass any reforms to ICE because of the GOP’s decision to go it alone using reconciliation, the party still benefits. Republicans will spend nearly two months of floor time to pass border and deportation funding that would usually pass with bipartisan support.
The loss of time could undercut Johnson’s hopes of passing a broader, election-year package designed to boost House GOP chances ahead of the midterm elections.
A House GOP leadership source acknowledged the time crunch, noting that each reconciliation bill can take weeks or months to complete. They told the Washington Examiner that Johnson will advocate a third reconciliation bill to push the remaining priorities nonetheless.
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“In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited,” Johnson and Thune said in a joint statement. “In return, Democrats will once again demonstrate to the American people their support for open borders and keeping criminal illegal immigrants in America.”
Republicans were forced into this corner of using a party-line practice to pass funding as a result of Democrats being unwavering in their push to add guardrails to ICE following the killings in Minneapolis.
