Senate Republicans are pushing ahead with their partisan $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement, but the effort faces some uncertainty because of lingering concerns about the Trump administration’s scuttled plans for a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.
The Senate on Wednesday afternoon voted 53-46 along party lines to kick off debate on an updated version of Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill, which would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol through fiscal year 2029.
Prior to the vote, Republicans removed a proposed $1 billion in Secret Service security funding, including money for President Trump’s new White House ballroom, from the package. They also took out roughly $1.5 billion in funding for the Justice Department, a change that Republican leaders reportedly made with an eye toward making it harder to modify the text of the bill to limit or prohibit the Trump administration’s controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. GOP leaders reportedly fear that such language could scuttle the whole package.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s revised portion of the bill now provides just over $31 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $13 billion for Customs and Border Protection and another $2.5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security.
Wednesday’s vote comes after Republicans faced infighting and a two-week delay in their path to taking up their partisan funding package. They initially faced sharp pushback on the ballroom funding in the bill, forcing them to backtrack on that proposal. Then they were forced to cancel a planned vote on the reconciliation bill last month amid fierce blowback to the Trump administration’s “anti-weaponization” fund, which critics called a slush fund that would benefit allies of the president who claim to have been harmed by the Biden administration.
Some Republicans still fuming: Anger over the settlement fund could still derail the bill.
The budget reconciliation process that Republicans are using to pass their bill and avoid a potential Democratic filibuster allows for a flurry of amendment votes known as a “vote-a-rama.” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters that he plans to introduce an amendment to permanently block the $1.8 billion fund.
“We’ve got to either eliminate, streamline it, guardrail it,” Tillis told reporters. “It can’t go in its current form, and if that’s the only choice we should have, we should eradicate it.”
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy indicated to reporters that he would back the Tillis amendment. “I want to make sure it’s not mostly dead, that it is truly dead,” Cassidy said of the payout fund. And Sen. John Cornyn reposted a Wall Street Journal editorial that called on Republicans to kill the settlement fund for good by blocking money for its use. “The way to ensure the Trump retribution fund is more than mostly dead would be for Congress to put a stake through it,” Cornyn wrote.
Tillis, Cassidy and other lawmakers remain concerned even after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a congressional panel Tuesday that the administration won’t move forward with the fund and was permanently dropping the idea. Blanche, however, dismissed Democratic calls to put his pledge in writing.
Trump says he loves the fund: President Trump on Wednesday was far less definitive than Blanche had been, heightening concerns that the fund could eventually be resurrected. Asked if the fund was dead or just on hold, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he does not know and would “have to ask the lawyers.” He also called the fund a “beautiful thing” and defended the idea of compensating his allies and the rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His comments suggested he hasn’t given up on the “anti-weaponization” fund.
“I love it. I think it’s so important,” he said.
Those comments echoed an earlier defense of the settlement fund. In a Tuesday interview with the New York Post that was posted this morning, Trump repeated his baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him and endorsed the idea of a fund to benefit people who he said had been victimized by the government.
Asked by the Post if he had dropped the anti-weaponization fund, Trump said, “No, a court ruled against it.” He went on to again defend the January 6 rioters: “But just so you understand, these are people that have been decimated. These are people that lost their lives over nonsense … There's never been anything like this, what happened to those people. And these were many great people, and I gave them pardons. I'm very proud to have given them pardons. And I think they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”
Some Republicans agree with Trump. Sen. Lindsey Graham posted on X Tuesday evening that he still believes that the Biden Justice Department improperly victimized many Americans and that those people should be able to pursue claims for compensation. “Therefore,” he wrote, “I am proposing that we create a weaponization fund that will be available to those who can prove their claim against the federal government through the Federal Tort Claims Act. We have a legal system already in place for people to make claims against the government.”
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. reportedly responded to Graham’s post by writing, “We’re on it.” That post was later deleted.
What’s next: The Senate will hold a marathon voting session that Republicans hope will end with the passage of their stalled immigration enforcement funding. Democrats are looking to force Republicans to cast some difficult amendment votes and they could join with Tillis and a small band of Republicans to rein in or explicitly kill the settlement fund, which would jeopardize the larger bill. Any such amendment may have to clear a 60-vote threshold, depending on a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian, which would make it far less likely to succeed. The ultimate outcome of the amendment votes and the fate of the funding package remain uncertain.