Democrats Held Up ICE Funding for 115 Days. The House Just Took That Leverage Away Until 2029.

The House voted 214-212 on Tuesday night to send roughly $70 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, ending a 115-day standoff that had become the central fight of the year on Capitol Hill. The bill now goes to President Trump’s desk for his signature, and it does something the last immigration package didn’t: it funds the agencies all the way through fiscal year 2029, the end of Trump’s term.

That timeline is the whole point. By locking in three years of money in a single bill, Republicans stripped Democrats of the recurring leverage they had used since February to force a negotiation over how ICE operates. There will be no annual appropriations fight over ICE’s budget for the rest of this presidency.

“What we’ve done now by funding it for three years, we’ve taken away their ability to cut that funding, to block that funding or to take hostage the funding for the remainder of the Trump administration,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said after the vote.

What’s in the $70 billion

According to the White House, the package directs about $38 billion to ICE, roughly $26 billion to the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection, and another $5 billion set aside for unforeseen costs. It is the second multibillion-dollar infusion into the two agencies in the past year, following the immigration money Republicans pushed through in the original budget reconciliation law.

The measure cleared the chamber on a near-party-line vote. Every Democrat opposed it. The only other “no” came from Representative Kevin Kiley of California, who recently switched his affiliation from Republican to independent. Kiley said he had “very strong concerns” about the “strictly party-line process” and wanted “significant bipartisan reforms to interior immigration enforcement,” though he had helped advance the bill on an earlier procedural vote.

Republicans were able to move the money without a single Democratic vote because they ran it through budget reconciliation, the process that lets qualifying spending and tax bills clear the Senate with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes most legislation needs to break a filibuster. That is how the Senate passed its version with 52 votes and why the minority’s leverage was always going to come from the calendar — the recurring need to fund the agencies — rather than from the floor math on any single bill.

The two-vote margin underscores how little room Johnson had. Republicans had blown past a June 1 deadline Trump set to get the bill to his desk, after a group of Republicans in both chambers balked at an administration demand to insert a roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund — money critics warned could be used to compensate Jan. 6 defendants and other Trump allies. The fight over that fund was part of what dragged out the final stretch after the Senate cleared the same package 52-47 in an overnight session. In the end, lawmakers neither created the fund in statute nor formally banned it; the Justice Department has said it will not pursue it. A separate provision that would have funded security for Trump’s planned White House ballroom — a line item that drew scrutiny when the bill text first emerged — was stripped out.

Why the standoff lasted 115 days

The impasse traces back to Minneapolis. After federal agents shot and killed two American citizens during immigration operations in the city earlier this year — among them Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three — Democrats said they would not approve more money for ICE and CBP without changes to how the agencies operate. For roughly four months, that position held, and the agencies’ funding lapsed, contributing to the budget pressures that strained the Department of Homeland Security through the spring.

Democratic leaders spelled out what they had wanted and didn’t get. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said his caucus pushed for judicial warrant requirements before agents could detain U.S. citizens, mandatory body cameras, explicit limits on the use of force, a ban on agents wearing masks during operations, and a prohibition on entering houses of worship, hospitals and schools. None of it made the final bill.

“ICE is out of control, and operating in far too many ways in a lawless fashion, and the American people know it,” Jeffries said at a news conference before the vote.

Republicans rejected that framing, casting the money as a straightforward backstop for agencies carrying out the administration’s enforcement agenda. With the funding now spanning the rest of Trump’s term, the operational questions Democrats raised — over warrants, body cameras and force — lose their most direct point of pressure, since there is no near-term budget vote to attach them to.

What changes now

Once Trump signs the bill, ICE and the Border Patrol have budget certainty through September 2029. That removes immigration funding from the list of fights that could trigger a future shutdown showdown and gives the agencies a multiyear runway to hire, detain and carry out removals without returning to Congress for the core money.

For Democrats, the loss is strategic as much as substantive. The annual or stopgap funding deadline has long been the minority party’s main tool for extracting concessions on an agency it doesn’t control. By converting ICE and CBP into multiyear line items, Republicans have closed that window until at least the next administration. The reforms Jeffries listed are not dead as legislation, but they no longer have a must-pass funding bill to ride on.

The CBO scored the underlying reconciliation framework earlier in the spring, and the agencies’ spending plans will now play out under regular oversight rather than the brinkmanship that defined the last four months. The next test is operational: whether a flush, three-year budget changes the pace and reach of enforcement in cities like Minneapolis, where the standoff began.