Senate passes $70 billion ICE funding bill, sends it to House

The Senate approved a roughly $69.5 billion to $70 billion package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Protection for three years, giving President Donald Trump a major immigration-enforcement win and sending the bill to the House. The 52-47 vote came after about 18 hours of amendment votes in a marathon vote-a-rama that began Thursday and ran into early Friday morning. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to oppose it.

The scale of the package goes well beyond a single budget line. Earlier committee text had set aside $9.5 billion for CBP recruitment in fiscal 2026, nearly $7.5 billion for ICE recruitment, and about $3.5 billion for other CBP operations through fiscal 2029, including procurement and the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning for mission support. Republicans pushed the bill through budget reconciliation, a process that let them advance the measure without Democratic votes and lock in immigration-enforcement money through the end of Trump’s term.

That funding push followed a record-breaking 76-day Department of Homeland Security shutdown earlier in 2026 and months of Republican effort to move immigration money through Congress. Senate and House steps in April helped clear the path, including a Senate budget resolution on April 21 and House adoption on April 29. With the Senate vote complete, the House is now the last stop before Trump can sign the measure into law.

What the bill did not include may matter as much as what it did. Senate Republicans left out a ban on the administration’s separate $1.776 billion to $1.8 billion Justice Department “anti-weaponization” fund, a provision critics said could be used for taxpayer-funded payouts to people claiming the federal government had targeted them. Democrats tried to kill or limit the fund during the vote-a-rama, arguing it could benefit Trump allies, including some people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

The omission marked the clearest political line in the package. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told senators the fund had nothing to do with reconciliation and that no reconciliation money would go to it, but skepticism lingered. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said Blanche’s two-hour meeting with Republicans was “one of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate,” a sign that the fight over immigration money had become inseparable from the larger struggle over executive power, Justice Department discretion and how far Republicans were willing to go to protect Trump’s priorities.