The budget crisis and proposal also present a difficult scenario for the Biden administration heading into the spring, when illegal crossings at the southern border are expected to rise again. On Tuesday, House Republicans voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his border record, and immigration remains President Biden's worst-rated issue in polls.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential campaign, bragged about his role in influencing lawmakers to block the border bill, which he said would have benefited Biden politically.
DHS could try to cover the funding gap at ICE by reprogramming funds from the Coast Guard, TSA or other agencies within the department. But such moves are controversial, and ICE officials say the $700 million shortfall is the largest projected shortfall the agency has faced in recent memory.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations, said some of the proposed cost savings would occur when deportations reduce ICE detention levels, but much of it would have to happen through mass releases of detainees. .
Erin Heater, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Congress is “chronically underfunded” the department’s vital missions on the southwest border.
“Recently, Congress outright rejected a bipartisan national security bill, which will jeopardize existing DHS removals,” Heater said in a statement. “Reducing ICE operations would significantly harm border security, national security, and public safety.”
Record crossings in late 2023 left Department of Homeland Security agencies exhausting their budgets for fiscal year 2024, which began Oct. 1.
The proposed border funding bill, which emerged last week after months of negotiations in the Senate, includes new executive powers and resources long sought by Republicans. The bill would have tightened restrictions on asylum eligibility at the southern border while giving the president emergency powers to summarily expel migrants if crossings exceed 5,000 people per day.
The legislation provided a significant funding injection for ICE. It was among the most significant concessions Democratic lawmakers made to Republicans, who have long tried to restrict ICE enforcement within American cities and communities by opposing significant increases in spending on detention and deportation.
The supplemental bill includes $7.6 billion for ICE overall, including $2.6 billion for deportation flights and $3.2 billion for detention capacity, money that would have boosted capacity by thousands of beds per day. The agency has contracts and agreements with dozens of local jails and county jails across the United States, where it can hold detainees for weeks, months and sometimes longer as they await a court ruling or face deportation. About half of ICE's $8.5 billion annual budget is used for detention and deportation operations.
The bill's failure upended traditional partisan politics on immigration, with most Democrats embracing new border restrictions and enforcement funding, while Republicans opposed the bill in part because it could benefit the sitting president.
Activists who have campaigned to close immigration detention facilities or argued that ICE should be eliminated entirely — and who typically denounce Republican hardliners — were happy to see GOP lawmakers kill the border bill.
“While we feel some relief that the Senate did not include the harmful and permanent immigration policy changes it was considering and that ICE did not receive more than an additional $7 billion on top of its already astronomical budget, we continue to demand actual cuts.” [to the ICE budget] “It shrinks the detention system,” said Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, an advocacy coalition.
“We find it difficult to frame that ICE is facing cuts, when ICE's budget has continued to grow astronomically year over year,” Shah said.
Facing record numbers of illegal crossings at the Mexico border and mounting criticism from his own party, Biden has deployed ICE officers more aggressively and ramped up deportation flights in recent months. White House officials say the administration has deported or returned 500,000 immigrants since May, more than Trump has done on an annual basis during his term.
Biden did not start with this approach. The president ordered a temporary halt to deportations by ICE when he took office in January 2021. His administration directed ICE officers to be more restrictive and prioritize immigrants who pose a threat to national security or public safety, along with recent border crossers .
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests that led to deportation fell from about 80,000 a year under Trump to nearly 35,000 a year during Biden's first three years, according to the Bureau of Homeland Security Statistics.
Most people detained by ICE are not immigrants arrested in U.S. cities for crimes, but new arrivals detained along the Mexico border, ICE statistics show. Of the 38,500 detainees in ICE detention at the end of January, 72 percent were transferred by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
DHS officials said the significant reduction in ICE detention capacity would likely result in more immigrants eligible for deportation being released from U.S. custody along the border. This would further undermine the Biden administration's strategy of implementing “consequences” — especially deportations and returns — to deter migrants who cross the border illegally and are not eligible for asylum.
John Sandweg, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama, said many Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach Mayorkas attacked him for releasing border crossers who should be detained. ICE doesn't have the capacity to do that, Sandweg said.
“There are demands on ICE right now that are far greater than the resources available to meet them,” he said.
“ICE is funded at levels far lower than Republicans want,” Sandweg said. “You can't have your cake and eat it too.”
