I Need To Correct An Error

Folks, I made an error in a piece I wrote the other day. It’s a bit wonky, but it’s important to set the record straight.

I wrote that money for ICE in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” had not been appropriated yet by Congressional budget committees, and therefore if they had not passed a budget bill but either allowed funding to lapse (a shutdown) or passed a continuing resolution to fund Homeland Security, the funding would remain at 2024 levels, when the last budget appropriation bill for DHS was enacted.

That is how normal appropriations work. A reconciliation bill doesn’t normally appropriate anything; that’s usually up to the Committees.

Then I saw Rep. DeLauro’s statement about the proposed mini-bus appropriations bill for ICE, and I was taken aback. She wrote,

“The Homeland Security funding bill is more than just ICE. If we allow a lapse in funding, TSA agents will be forced to work without pay, FEMA assistance could be delayed, and the U.S. Coast Guard will be adversely affected. All while ICE continues functioning without any change in their operations due to $75 billion it received in the One Big Beautiful Bill. A continuing resolution will jettison the guardrails we have secured while ceding authority to President Trump, Stephen Miller, and Secretary Noem.” (Emphasis added.)

This caught me by surprise, so I had to go look more deeply into the OBBB. And sure enough, in that huge document there was something highly unusual in there: a direct appropriation for ICE operations and ICE detention centers:

For detention/capacity:

“(a) Appropriation.—In addition to amounts otherwise available, there is appropriated to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for fiscal year 2025, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $45,000,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2029, for the purposes described in subsection (b).”

For enforcement/removal:

“(a) Appropriation.—In addition to amounts otherwise available, there is appropriated to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for fiscal year 2025, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $14,400,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2029, for the purposes described in subsection (b).”

I missed this, and that’s on me. What it meant was that House Dems had very little to work with. ICE was going to get its allocated $75 billion no matter if the government shut down or if there was a continuing resolution to fund it. All a shutdown would do is impact DHS’s other activities, such as FEMA and the Coast Guard.

The Dems should have been sounding this from the rooftops to let voters know about these existing constraints so that we could set our expectations. If even someone like me didn’t understand this—and I read about this process constantly and normally would have seen this show up somewhere and explained if they’d bothered to highlight it—that would have been helpful.

Bottom line? There was no realistic way to stop ICE funding in 2026 through the regular appropriations process or a government shutdown. I feel this is a very important point that the appropriators never said was already a hard fact, and we’re only hearing about it after a deal was made. There may be strategic reasons for them not making this clear to the public, but it’s extremely frustrating that the money for ICE was already appropriated in the OBBB and nobody on the Democratic side highlighted that fact.

Talk about a problem with messaging.

I apologize for getting this wrong, but at least there is a somewhat happy ending to it. The proposed appropriation bill put guardrails on ICE, increases oversight, reduced the number of beds ICE can have in its facilities, and cuts some funding from both CBP and ICE. Given what we now know, that feels like a small win, albeit a bittersweet one.

Again, I apologize for this error in my analysis, all built on a faulty assumption that there’s no way they would appropriate that much money for ICE in the OBBB and not make it crystal clear that it was there no matter what happened next.