Republican Maneuvers to Force Through DHS Funding Shows Why Democrats Can't Lead the Fight for Immigrant Rights - Left Voice
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The Republican-controlled Senate bypassed normal budget procedures to pass $70 billion in funding for DHS and ICE. We should have no illusions that Congressional maneuvering can get us out of an authoritarian crisis, or that Democrats even oppose ICE in the first place.

On Friday, June 5 the Senate passed a $70 billion bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its repressive attacks on immigrants through the rest of Donald Trump’s term. This is on top of the $191 billion allocated to DHS in 2025. The bill, part of a “reconciliation package,” is an attempt to sneak through the budget allocation by sending it through a process that prevents it from being filibustered, effectively allowing it to pass with a majority vote in the Senate. The bill moves to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass with a majority vote.

Democrats in Congress had previously shut down the government over funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the wake of the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. They demanded a series of behavioral reforms to ICE, including preventing them from wearing masks and prohibiting them from entering spaces like schools and courts.

It’s worth noting that Democrats didn’t make any demands about even reducing ICE’s multi-billion dollar budget, or prosecuting the ones that killed those in Minneapolis. In fact, Democrats had joined their Republican colleagues in unanimously voting to approve DHS funding back in March, with the exception of ICE and CBP. This bill would fully fund those two agencies within DHS, enabling them to continue carrying out their vicious attacks on immigrants with no restrictions whatsoever.

After the Democrats, under pressure from the immigrant rights movement, blocked Republicans from securing a 60-vote threshold to bypass the Senate filibuster, Republicans responded by passing a “budget resolution” including the funding and kicking the problem down the road. This allowed them to use the “reconciliation procedure,” a loophole in the lawmaking process and Senate rules established in the late 20th century. Normally, any bill which gives funds to departments in the federal government is part of the appropriations process, where budgeting requires 60 votes to advance past the notorious Senate filibuster.

Once the government approved the budget and reopened, “reconciliation instructions” in the resolution direct committees to draft legislation in order to achieve the financial goals laid out in the budget. The draft legislation is compiled by the Budget Committee into a single bill – a “reconciliation bill” that is subject to majority vote. Although this process is “intended” by the ruling class to prevent the accumulation of government debt, Republicans seized on the moment to achieve their political goals anyway.

These convoluted procedures, despite giving the appearance of a system with checks and balances that incentivize cooperation between parties, are little more than bureaucratic hurdles that can be cast aside by the ruling class at their whim. Both Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill were moved along through mechanism. The reality is that both parties represent the ruling class – one is simply more concerned with the public appearances of a bipartisan attack on immigrants than the other, and neither really care about the consequences of a ballooning government deficit.

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Despite appearing as opposition to the increasingly repressive Trump regime, the Democratic Party has no answers when Republicans pull out every stop to accomplish their draconian agenda. Even worse, they were totally complicit in building up the repressive apparatus targeting immigrants today. Their legacy in implementing “tough on the border” policies goes back to Bill Clinton’s immigration reform bill, which made it easier to deport immigrants, built up the dangerous border that led to the deaths of thousands of migrants, and oversaw the deportation of one million people. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were happy to carry on that legacy with the full support of their parties. Any attempt to appear opposed to Trump on immigration is not only hypocritical – it betrays that Democrats want the same policies with a nicer face.

A genuine opposition to Trump’s agenda on immigration wouldn’t limit itself to bans on masks, easily broken rules about where ICE is allowed to operate, or to simply maintaining the existing budget for DHS. Even though states like New Jersey have passed laws barring ICE agents from covering their faces, that hasn’t stopped them from wearing masks while repressing protesters at Delaney Hall, or stopped the Democrat-controlled state government from sending police to help them. The reality is that ICE is one violent arm of the capitalist state, which brutalizes and detains immigrants in order to divide the working class, increase the precarity of their labor, and clear the field for a Trump administration to repress any movement that emerges in opposition to his agenda.

The only force capable of fighting Trump, ICE, and the far-right is an independent working class movement fighting for its own demands. The Democrats are politically inept, unwilling and unable to oppose Trump’s agenda because they are complicit in the ruling class’ attacks. Through class struggle methods independent of the Democratic Party, such as the rebellion in Minneapolis and the ongoing confrontations with ICE at Delaney Hall in New jersey, we can form a national movement capable of defeating Trump, establishing full rights for immigrants, and abolishing ICE completely.

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