House Democrats called for small cuts to funding for the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement mission in a new spending bill released Tuesday, but also pressed to revoke more than $2 billion in money already in the pipeline for former President Trump’s border wall.
The bill, which covers fiscal year 2022, would cut the number of detention beds U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can fill on the average day to 28,500, and rejects calls by Republicans for more Border Patrol agents.
Instead, it pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into the legal immigration branch, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to try to cut down on application backlogs. USCIS is supposed to be funded by fees paid by migrants themselves, but Democrats are wary of the prices they would have to charge, and are proposing taxpayers pick up some of the tab instead.
The bill also requires Homeland Security to provide illegal immigrants with access to lawyers, imposes stricter standards on which migrants can be detained while awaiting their court cases or deportations, and bans Homeland Security investigators at ICE from doing immigration enforcement work unless it involves a criminal offense not related to immigration.
“We must do more to protect immigrants, especially children and their families. I am proud that this bill respects their dignity by improving conditions in CPB short-term holding facilities, investing in alternatives to detention, making processing quicker and more efficient, and reducing backlogs of immigration, refugee and asylum applications,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat.
The decision to revoke $2.26 billion in wall money is particularly controversial at a time when the U.S. southern border is experiencing a record-breaking surge of migrants. That money is cash Congress allocated over the last four years, but which the Trump administration had not yet spent when its tenure ended in January.
President Biden has paused wall construction, but Congress’s chief watchdog has said that pause, while legal for now, cannot go on indefinitely and at some point the new administration will have to spend the money Congress has authorized.
Revoking the money would be a way to solve that legal conundrum, yet it may also prove politically tricky, with polls showing the wall is becoming more popular as the border spirals into chaos.
While other federal departments are seeing major funding boosts in the Biden era, both the White House and House Democrats called for only modest increases for Homeland Security. Under the House proposal, funding would be $52.8 billion in base funding, up $934 million over 2021. The bill also includes $18.8 billion in disaster response money.
Democrats will hold the first committee action on the House bill Wednesday, with an eye to putting the legislation on the House floor in July.
The proposal, if it survives, would then have to be married to a corresponding Senate bill, which has not yet been released.
The Homeland Security bill has become the toughest of the 12 annual spending measures Congress is supposed to pass, with immigration issues causing deep rifts between the two parties.