Thune on plans to fund ICE & CBP

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) on Tuesday laid out GOP plans to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) through the reconciliation process while chastising Democrats for the handling of the Homeland Security Department funding debacle.

“We are going to move quickly, decisively and hopefully, in a very focused way on ensuring that those important law enforcement agencies — contrary to the Democrats’ ‘defund law enforcement’ efforts — are funded not only today, but well into the future,” he said at a press conference.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is crafting a narrow budget resolution that, if approved, would open the door to later passing three years’ worth of ICE and CBP funding in a party-line vote.

Republicans went this route after failing to reach a compromise with Democrats on possible immigration enforcement reforms following the killings of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.

“All of the things that the Democrats made this about, which was supposed to be about reforms to the way that ICE and CBP operate, they got none of it, zero,” Sen. Thune said the 60th day of the DHS shutdown.

“The only thing the Democrats got out of this was they now own the issue of open borders and defund law enforcement.”

President Trump has set a June 1 deadline for the funding measure to reach his desk, but the process is cumbersome, with a marathon vote-a-rama and strict limits on what can be included in a reconciliation bill.

The budget resolution will need to be approved by both chambers before the reconciliation bill that includes the funding can be moved.

As part of the plan, the rest of the Homeland Security Department would be funded through a regular appropriations bill.

It’s the same strategy that Sen. Thune proposed before the two-week recess, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) rejected it, calling the plan a “joke.”

Over the recess, the two leaders got on the same page with the two-part funding strategy.

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