Senate approves $70B immigration bill after settlement fight

Senate passes – The Senate passed a $70 billion bill to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the end of President Donald Trump’s term early Friday, clearing major hurdles in a late-night fight over whether to permanently ban payouts from a controversial settlement fund tied to

WASHINGTON — Early Friday morning, as the clock crept toward 5 a.m., the Senate finally moved past a bruising stretch of delay and backlash and voted to fund President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies for the next three years.

Senators approved the $70 billion legislation by a vote of 52-47. setting money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term. The final tally came just after Republicans narrowly defeated multiple attempts by Democrats and Republicans to add language that would permanently ban Trump’s settlement fund for political allies who say they were politically persecuted.

The urgency had been building for weeks. ICE and Border Patrol money had been delayed for months. and lawmakers tied the slowdown to fights over policy after federal agents killed two protesters in January. But this time the vote nearly derailed over something else entirely: an unrelated $1.776 billion settlement fund that Senate Republicans and Democrats spent almost all of Thursday testing party loyalty over whether it should be restricted.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., acknowledged the grinding nature of the settlement argument as the chamber worked through the night. “This would have been done several hours ago if we weren’t having to deal with some of the issues around the fund,” he said shortly before midnight.

Thune. who has criticized the judgment fund that sits at the center of the dispute. pushed for weeks to keep the bill focused on immigration enforcement funding and avoid new provisions that could complicate passage in the House. He also pointed lawmakers back to the central question: fund ICE and Border Patrol.

Still, a group of Republican senators pressed to block the settlement fund’s payouts through amendments, turning what should have been a straightforward immigration vote into an internal party showdown.

The pressure escalated after Trump raised fresh doubts Wednesday afternoon — just as the Senate had voted to begin debate on the immigration bill. Speaking to reporters. Trump called the settlement “very important” and said. “I don’t know” whether it is dead or on hold. “I’d have to ask the lawyers,” he added.

That uncertainty set the stage for a sequence of votes that stretched across Thursday morning and deep into the night.

The first attempt to ban the settlement came in a Democratic effort Thursday morning. The motion was held open for several hours as three senators — including Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy — weighed whether to support it. Cassidy eventually voted against the Democratic motion. and the two other Republican senators who voted for it were Jon Husted of Ohio and Dan Sullivan of Alaska. both of whom are up for reelection this year. The Democratic motion was narrowly defeated.

The Senate then rejected a second amendment from Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Tillis’s proposal would have banned the settlement fund but redirected the money to a separate anti-fraud fund at the Department of Justice. Most Democrats voted against it, ensuring its defeat, but more than 10 Republicans supported Tillis.

Tillis framed the settlement as a political liability. “If Blanche says this is largely inoperative, why not use this moment to codify that?” he said. “Otherwise. you’re exposing every one of our members who are in cycle to having to deal with this between today and Election Day. and that makes no sense for something that the DOJ says they’re not moving forward with.”.

At the center of the legal argument is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who said earlier this week that the settlement fund would not go forward.

Cassidy, however, argued the fund remains alive in a practical sense. Despite Blanche’s comments, Cassidy said the settlement fund is still part of an active settlement and “absolutely can be used.”

Cassidy’s amendment was also a pointed rebuke in political terms. His proposal would have compensated injured police officers for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The fight mattered because the settlement’s payouts could have potentially gone to Trump supporters who beat police and attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Senate rejected several other Democratic efforts meant to limit or block the settlement fund, including amendments to ban payments to Jan. 6 defendants who injured law enforcement officers.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took aim at the Republican approach once the Senate left those attempts behind. He said Republicans were now “leaving taxpayers to rely on nothing more than a promise from Donald Trump’s personal fixer. That is not accountability. That is a permission slip.”.

While the settlement debate consumed the spotlight, lawmakers also pushed the bill itself toward a landing point. Enactment of the roughly $70 billion measure to fund ICE and Border Patrol would end the months-long blockade by Democrats who had demanded policy changes after the fatal shootings of two protesters by federal agents in January.

The bill would fund the agencies for three years, through the end of Trump’s term.

Republicans used a complicated procedural maneuver to get around the filibuster and pass the budget legislation with no Democratic votes. Still, getting the bill to the Senate floor took weeks. Republicans navigated obstacles created by Trump and the White House. including a $1 billion proposal for White House security and Trump’s ballroom that they eventually scrapped. before confronting the fierce bipartisan backlash over the settlement fund.

Democrats argued that any Homeland Security Department funding bill should include restraints on federal immigration authorities — including better identification for federal officers and more use of judicial warrants, among other asks.

The shutdown of ICE and Border Patrol funding traces back to a failed effort to tie immigration enforcement tactics to the larger Homeland Security budget negotiations. After federal agents shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Trump agreed to a Democratic request that the Homeland Security bill be separated from a larger spending measure that became law.

But bipartisan negotiations went nowhere. The Homeland Security department funding lapsed in mid-February without agreement on changes to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

Congress later funded the rest of the Homeland Security Department at the end of April with Democratic support, but ICE and Border Patrol still lacked regular funding — until the Senate’s early Friday vote.

The sequencing left a clear throughline: the immigration enforcement funds moved only after lawmakers fought over whether a separate Trump-linked settlement fund would be restricted. By the time the Senate voted 52-47. the clock had already run far past when many lawmakers believed the bill could pass cleanly. In the final hours, the question was not just whether ICE and Border Patrol would receive money. It was whether the settlement fight would leave any permanent limits behind as the agencies’ funding resumed.

U.S. Senate immigration enforcement ICE Border Patrol Homeland Security settlement fund Todd Blanche John Thune Bill Cassidy Thom Tillis Chuck Schumer