Senate Republicans passed a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement early Friday, voting 52-47 at 4:52 a.m. after more than 18 hours of amendment votes. The measure now goes to the House after a marathon overnight session that ended with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska as the lone Republican opposed to final passage.
The vote gives Customs And Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement a major funding boost through President Donald Trump's presidency, and it did so without attaching any new restrictions on the president. For supporters, that was the point: to move money quickly into the agencies carrying out the administration's border agenda.
The scale of the spending made the result notable. The reconciliation bill directs billions toward ICE and CBP, two agencies at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown, and it cleared the Senate just as House Republicans canceled Friday votes and looked instead to next week for possible action. For readers following customs and border protection funding, the key detail is not just that the bill passed, but that it advanced on a straight party-line basis after an all-night grind.
That grind also exposed the fault lines inside the GOP. About 17 hours into the amendment marathon, Sen. Bill Cassidy asked to change a mistaken nay vote to a yea after the outcome was already clear, then offered a measure that would have redirected the $1.8 billion settlement fund to law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His proposal drew 52 votes, short of the 60 needed, even as a Democratic bid to bar federal or private funds for Trump's planned East Wing ballroom won 53 votes after Cassidy's switch. Democrats and a small group of Republican holdouts argued Congress should block the settlement fund outright, but the Senate did not do that.
Sen. John Kennedy put the fight in blunt terms on Thursday, saying the objective was to get DHS funded and that unrelated issues had been thrust into the process. He also said lawmakers had lost sight of their ultimate objective. In the end, they did not resolve those side fights; they simply moved the money anyway. The House is the next test, and that vote will show whether Republicans can turn a narrow Senate win into final passage next week or whether the bill becomes another promise that stalls before reaching Trump's desk.
