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Block the $72 Billion ICE/Border Patrol Bill

The House and Senate are moving on parallel tracks toward a $72 billion budget reconciliation bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection through 2029. Both chambers adopted the joint budget resolution on April 29; the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees released their legislative text on May 4; markups in both chambers are slated for the week of May 19, with floor votes targeted before the president’s June 1 deadline.

By using reconciliation, Republicans would bypass the normal appropriations process, bypass Democratic input, and bypass any meaningful accountability for two agencies whose officers have shot 34 people since January 2025, killing at least nine. At least five of those shot were U.S. citizens.

ICE Is Committing and Being Credibly Accused of Numerous Human Rights Violations

Two of those killings happened seventeen days apart in Minneapolis, and both became national flashpoints.

  • On January 7, Renee Good — a 37-year-old poet, U.S. citizen, and mother of three — was shot through her windshield by an ICE agent moments after dropping her six-year-old at school.
  • On January 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse, was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and shot by Border Patrol agents after stepping between an officer and a woman they had pushed down. In both cases, bystander video contradicted the administration’s account. In one, agents were placed on leave for apparently lying under oath. In another, an agent bragged in text messages about how many of his bullets had struck the U.S. citizen he shot.Conditions inside detention facilities are no less alarming. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — the highest annual toll in two decades.
  • In January 2026 alone, six more died in detention, and one death was ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner, who found the detainee died of asphyxia from neck and torso compression at the hands of facility guards.
  • The Department of Justice has declined to open civil rights investigations. This is an agency that operates, in the words of the American Immigration Council, “with impunity and little to no transparency, even when lives are at stake.”Trump’s Personal Paramilitary Forces Should Not Be Given BillionsAmericans rightly condemn governments that deploy armed security forces into civilian neighborhoods, shoot unarmed people without due process, detain individuals in conditions that produce preventable deaths, and then lie about what happened. These are hallmarks of authoritarian governance — the very abuses that U.S. foreign policy has historically claimed to oppose. Yet this is precisely what ICE is doing on American streets. Agents in unmarked vehicles and tactical gear conduct operations in residential neighborhoods.
  • The Wall Street Journal documented at least 13 instances of agents firing into civilian vehicles — a practice that the Department of Justice and most major police agencies have spent decades trying to eliminate because it endangers bystanders and leads to unjustified killings. Georgetown Law’s Christy Lopez, a former senior DOJ civil rights litigator, has concluded that agents “are actually stoking” fear rather thande-escalating — “and they should be trying to tamp it down.”
    $72 Billion Without Oversight, Accountability, or Democratic InputRepublican leaders chose the reconciliation process specifically to exclude Democrats from any role in a bipartisan shaping of this legislation. The bill requires only 51 Senate votes and cannot be filibustered. ICE and CBP funding was stripped from the regular DHS appropriations bill after Democrats insisted on accountability provisions following the Minneapolis killings. Rather than negotiate oversight measures, Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham designed a reconciliation vehicle to bypass that debate entirely.
    Senate committees released the bill text on May 4, with committee markups expected by May 15 and leadership targeting a floor vote before the President’s June 1 deadline. The CBO has noted that the amounts in this bill “significantly exceed annual appropriations provided in the past for similar activities.” This is not routine funding. It is a massive, multi-year expansion of an enforcement apparatus that has already demonstrated it cannot be trusted with the power it has. And it includes $1 billion for a White House ballroom renovation tucked into a bill sold as a border security necessity.‌What Congress Should Do
  • Vote NO on the ICE reconciliation bill. A vote for this bill is a vote to expand and entrench an agency that has killed U.S. citizens, presided over a record number of detention deaths, and systematically resisted accountability — all without a single hearing, a single amendment, or a single Democratic vote.
  • Demand independent oversight. No agency that has produced this volume of deaths, fabricated evidence, and lied under oath should evade independent use-of-force investigations, mandatory body camera requirements, and binding accountability mechanisms enforceable by Congress.
  • Use every procedural tool available to block or delay passage. Force a vote-a-rama that puts every senator on record. Offer amendments requiring transparency on detention deaths,use-of-force data, and the legal basis for shooting into civilian vehicles. Make the cost of this vote visible to every constituent.