Senate Republicans Have a Plan to Suspend Congressional Oversight of ICE for Trump’s Whole Term

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Rather disingenuously, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has proclaimed that the Senate will now fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through legislation that, he contends, has hardly anything in it to fear. He called the DHS budget reconciliation bill he anticipates soon passing the Senate “anorexic,” a strange term, as though the legislation were like a person with an eating disorder — but in context the majority leader apparently meant to convey the bill was thin, skeletal, near-empty, and utterly without threatening contents.

Do not let Thune’s description fool you. The plan hatched by Senate and House Republicans, backed by President Trump, to ram a bad if not pestilential bill through by wielding the mighty budget process is a virtual coup. That budget reconciliation, which is not intended to be used for several years of controversial appropriating, allows the Senate to pass legislation with a simple, 51-vote majority. Republicans will be able to pass what they want without any Democratic support, and with few opportunities for Democratic opposition. The process brooks little scrutiny or challenge. It strikes like lightning and steamrolls over democracy’s opposition. 

The DHS reconciliation bill, Republican leadership has said, will go far beyond the expected year’s funding for ICE. As a result, it will cloak ICE from congressional reform for three years — not one, but three, explicitly for Trump’s whole term — armoring officers against any future attempts, by, say, a Democratic House after January, to deal with its abuses. The legislation, as described, would swell two immigration police machines, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), to a combined size more than double that of any other federal police force. It would launch a massive, cruel empire of detention and deportation to catch and imprison hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of almost entirely innocuous and helpless people. If congressional Democrats — and hopefully a few Republicans — are going to do their best to wage a battle against this, then, given the forced pace of the budget process, there is no time to lose.

To understand what spawned this: Senate Democrats have been refusing to end their filibuster of the DHS appropriation bill, begun in the wake of two killings by federal officers in Minnesota, until Republicans agree to ICE reforms to address those abuses. Trump stonewalled Democrats’ attempts to discuss reforms, leading to many weeks of DHS shutdown. As TSA agents went unpaid and airports suffered, Trump belatedly decided to access other funds legislated to pay TSA, which relieved the airport pressure, but still left the shutdown impasse unresolved. Now, Trump and congressional Republicans collectively chose instead a combination of a budget reconciliation bill for ICE and CBP, passed by a process that would crush any Senate Democratic filibuster, plus a noncontroversial appropriation bill, for the rest of DHS. The whole bill is not yet unveiled, even as some Republicans seek a sweeping fiscal version far beyond DHS, but assuming Thune gets his DHS-focused bill, there are telltale signs of its threats. 

Just what is to fear about what will move by this juggernaut? First and foremost, the funding gap and shutdown all along have been about a one-year spending bill for DHS. It is the one missing piece of the 12 regular one-year spending bills for everything from Defense to Agriculture. These go through Congress every year, for a one-year duration, since the first appropriation bill, 13 lines long, was passed in 1789 for a one-year duration. (An individual spending item can be multi-year, such as for building an aircraft carrier, but the defense appropriation bill as a whole is always one year.)

But Thune will not settle for one year. He announced this was a three-year bill. Far from being, in his strange term, “anorexic,” this is a grossly monstrous behemoth. For every other department, the one-year appropriation means a need to pass the next one-year bill, next year. The case for the spending has to be made in a year, based on the record and the proposals of the past year. If the State Department, or EPA, or the Forest Service, perform badly in the previous year, they either have trouble getting their next budget proposals through Congress, or Congress puts provisions on the funding bill, called “riders,” requiring them to stop doing bad things and requiring better performance. In particular, when the federal police forces, like the FBI or the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the Secret Service, screw up, they must face congressional proposals for curative riders on their annual funding bills. For example, Republicans absolutely love to put riders on the annual funding bill for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, sounding the alarm every year that the Bureau will fail to treat owners of dangerous weapons with kindness and gentleness. That’s democracy. 

However, under Thune’s plan, that will not happen, not for three years anyway, for ICE and CBP. Congress will have no way to demand better performance by exercising its power of the purse. Coincidentally, Thune is making sure that If Democrats take control of the House in January 2027, no funding bill for ICE will come before him and his Senate colleagues to complicate his task as Senate Republican Leader. That means that, to take what would have been considered a far-out hypothetical process not long ago, next year ICE can shoot citizens down, man or woman, protester or not, with licenses for firearms or not, with officers’ masks on or off, cameras on or off, and no funding bill, absolutely none, will come to the floor as a vehicle for Congress to propose reforms. To put it differently, Thune is not just saying he wants to crush this year’s Democratic ICE shutdown — he wants to shut off all reform for 2026, and also for 2027, and also for 2028. He would be suspending the normal functioning of democracy, since 1789, for all that time, on what the Trump presidency has made one of the leading controversial issues in the country. 

But that is just the beginning. What else can Republicans put on board the DHS reconciliation bill steamroller? What they have ruled out, apparently, is a telltale sign of what they are ruling in. A while back, House Republicans proposed a so-called “Reconciliation 2.0”. This would make widespread fiscal changes, following last year’s reconciliation bill that slashed spending for Medicaid and food stamps, with changes to entitlements this year assertedly reducing the specter of “waste and fraud” in such entitlements. Thune ruled out making broad fiscal changes. It was pointed out, as a parliamentary matter, that if a bill with such changes was on the floor, the Democrats could offer their own fiscal changes, forcing the Senate Republican senators to make some very awkward votes. What that tells us, though, is that while eschewing general fiscal changes from categories of spending for other agencies not within DHS, the Thune bill can include power-expanding provisions that focus on ICE and CBP. Guidance for how to do this comes from the DHS appropriation the House passed twice — H.R. 7147 and 7744 — during the shutdown.

The House’s bill envisions a massive staffing increase for Trump’s immigration agenda. It would spend $8 billion specifically to increase ICE personnel by roughly 50%, aiming to hire 10,000 new employees over five years. And, it would provide funds to add 3,000 new Border Patrol agents in order to sustain a total of 22,000 agents. The bill will create a police force that is much more than twice the size of the FBI, which has 13,000 agents. That means that massive numbers of immigration agents can be deployed anywhere and everywhere. This carries the implication that ICE and CBP can take on lots of worrisome tasks without congressional interference. Remember that when the shutdown caused a shortage of TSA personnel, Trump sent ICE agents to 14 airports. They were not suited to the task, but he clearly enjoyed wielding them as his personal Praetorian guard. 

Trump’s allies have fueled debate about whether Trump would send ICE agents to the polls during the next election. Recently the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, discussed doing so. He told the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 28 that he couldn’t understand why anyone would disagree with a president deploying federal agents to the polls. That is a subject beyond this article, but whatever Trump’s political calculations, just thinking about the practical realities, with this bill, Trump will have enough masked and armed ICE agents and overtime pay for all the unwelcome deployments he wants. 

There has been much attention to the expanding program of ICE detention facilities. The press has noted both the inhumane conditions, and the waste and abuse in procuring the facilities, typically without salutary competition. The bill will overshadow the scale and abuses of the detention facility program of the past, creating a virtual detention empire. The House-passed bill required ICE to submit an execution plan for $45 billion in detention facility funding, signaling a large-scale expansion of incarceration space. 

What is to be done in the face of this on-rushing reconciliation bill? Critics and opponents must mobilize early, and realize the fight extends beyond the ICE reforms that were the heart of the shutdown debate. In addition to seeking such reforms, opponents must raise the alarm about what will be in the bill. By the time they see the final text of the reconciliation bill, it will be too late. 

Keep in mind the peculiar rhythm of the budget procedure. First the House and the Senate pass a skimpy “budget resolution.” This is just a prelude, with numbers rather than legislative language. The Senate allows fifty hours of debate, but without the legislative language, the debate may not readily address the key targets. House consideration tends to be relatively brief. 

After passing the budget resolution, two chambers can take up a reconciliation bill. Senate debate is limited to 20 hours (equally divided and controlled — so Democrats get only 10 hours) averaging 12 minutes per senator. Thune can schedule that debate, as has been done, to occur mainly in the wee hours of the night, so that a Democratic senator’s average allotment of 12 minutes of debate could occur, from the literal figuring, from 3:00 a.m. to 3:12 a.m. Excess amendments get scheduled for a vote one after the other, perhaps with two minutes of discussion apiece, in a debate-curtailing process called a “vote-a-rama.” 

Last year’s reconciliation bill had a marathon vote-a-rama that took place largely in the wee hours, significantly reducing press coverage. For example, hardly anyone noticed that the provision to defund Planned Parenthood had been approved, though it had sweeping implications. The same situation could play out around this budget reconciliation bill. To consign the issues of great national importance in the ICE debate — insulating ICE from congressional reform for three years to come — to this dark legislative basement is an insult to democracy. 

The public debate must anticipate what will go in the final version and start communicating, rallying, lobbying, speaking, and demanding amendments, at the early stages. Wake up! Given the aggressive pace of the budget process, there is no time to lose.