A U.S. Border Patrol official vehicle is shown parked near the border. (Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Judiciary Republicans Wednesday worked in committee on a portion of a major legislative package that would help fund President Donald Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations of people living in the United States without permanent legal status.
The Judiciary panel’s $81 billion share of the “one, big beautiful” bill the president has requested of Congress would provide $45 billion for immigration detention centers, $8 billion to hire thousands of immigration enforcement officers and more than $14 billion for deportations, among other things.
The border security and immigration funds are part of a massive package that wraps together White House priorities including tax cuts and defense spending boosts. Republicans are pushing the deal through using a special procedure known as reconciliation that will allow the Senate GOP to skirt its usual 60-vote threshold when that chamber acts.
House Republicans returning from a two-week recess kicked off their work on reconciliation Tuesday, approving three of 11 bills out of committees on Armed Services, Education and Workforce and Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, lawmakers continued work on the various sections of the reconciliation bill with markups — which means a bill is debated and potentially amended or rewritten — in the Financial Services, Judiciary, Transportation and Infrastructure and Oversight and Government Reform committees.
House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said Republicans will spend the rest of this week and next debating the 11 separate bills in committees. Committees when they finish their measures will send them to the House Budget Committee, which is expected to bundle them together prior to a floor vote.
The Judiciary panel’s 116-page bill vastly overhauls U.S. asylum laws. It would, for example, create a fee structure for asylum seekers that would set a minimum cost for an application at no less than $1,000. Applications now are free.
“These and other resources and fees in this reconciliation bill will ensure the Trump administration has the adequate resources to enforce the immigration laws in a fiscally responsible way,” GOP Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio said.
The bill would establish a $1,000 fee for immigrants granted temporary protected status, which would mean they would have work authorizations and deportation protections.
It would also require sponsors to pay $3,500 to take in an unaccompanied minor who crosses the border without a legal status. Typically, unaccompanied minors are released to sponsors who are family members living in the United States.
The bill would also require immigrants without permanent legal status to pay a $550 fee for work permits every six months.
The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, slammed the bill as targeting immigrants.
“Every day, this administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to erode constitutional rights and liberties,” he said.
A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.
‘A giveaway to ICE’
The Judiciary bill directs half of the fees collected from asylum seekers to go toward the agency that handles U.S. immigration courts, but Democrats criticized the provisions as creating a barrier for asylum seekers.
“The so-called immigration fees that are in this bill are really fines and nothing but a cruel attempt to make immigrating to this country impossible,” Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.
Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois, said the bill would not only “gut asylum” but would significantly increase funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
Funding for ICE detention this fiscal year is roughly $3.4 billion, but the Judiciary bill would sharply increase that to $45 billion.
Garcia called the increase a “a giveaway to ICE, a rogue agency that’s terrorizing communities and clamping (down) on civil liberties and the Constitution itself, because they’ve been directed to do so by this president.”
House Republicans have also included language that would move the Federal Trade Commission into the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a move Democrats argued would kneecap the FTC’s regulatory authority.
“You’re trying to shutter the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, making it harder for us to enforce our antitrust laws,” Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont said.
Consumer protections to take a hit
Lawmakers on the House Committee on Financial Services met in a lengthy, and at times tense, session to finalize legislation to cut “no less than” $1 billion from government programs and services under the panel’s jurisdiction, according to the budget resolution Congress approved in April.
Funds in the crosshairs include those previously authorized for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and grants provided under the Biden administration-era Inflation Reduction Act for homeowners to improve energy efficiency.
Chair French Hill said the committee “will do its part to reduce the deficit and decrease direct spending, so that Congress can enact pro-growth tax policies.”
“And remember, today, we are here with one purpose, to do our part to put our nation back on a responsible fiscal trajectory,” the Arkansas Republican said.
Democrats introduced dozens of amendments during the hourslong session to block cuts to community block grants and programs protecting consumers, including veterans, from illegal credit and lending practices.
Ranking member Maxine Waters said committee Republicans’ plans to cut the CFPB by 70% “is ridiculous.”
“The bureau has saved American consumers $21 billion by returning to them funds that big banks and predatory lenders swindled out of them,” said Waters, a California Democrat.
Congress created the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when subprime mortgage lending cascaded into bank failures and home and job losses.
Republicans opposed amendment after amendment.
Rep. María Salazar of Florida tossed a copy of one of Waters’ lengthy amendments straight into a trash can after a staffer handed it to her. Michigan’s Rep. Bill Huizenga held up proceedings for several minutes when he accused Waters of breaking the rules by not distributing enough paper copies of her amendment.
“We cannot allow our government to continue spending money like there are no consequences,” GOP Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in response to several Democratic amendments.
A final committee vote was expected Wednesday night.
Transportation section adds fees on electric vehicles
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee also approved, by a party line 36-30 vote, reconciliation instructions that would cut $10 billion from the federal deficit while boosting spending for the U.S. Coast Guard and the air traffic control system.
Like other portions of the larger reconciliation package, the transportation committee’s instructions would add funding for national security and border enforcement, through the Coast Guard funding, while cutting money from programs favored by Democrats, including climate programs and any spending that could be construed as race-conscious.
The bill would provide $21.2 billion for the Coast Guard and $12.5 billion for air traffic control systems. It would raise money through a $250 annual fee on electric vehicles and a $100 annual fee on hybrids, while also cutting $4.6 billion from climate programs created in Democrats’ 2022 reconciliation package.
Chairman Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, said the measure included priorities for members of both parties, as well as business and labor interests.
“We all want to invest in our Coast Guard,” he said. “We all want to rebuild our air traffic control system and finally address the broken Highway Trust Fund. We have held countless hearings on all of these topics, both recently and, frankly, for years. And now members have the opportunity to actually act.”
Democrats on the panel complained that the reconciliation package was a partisan exercise and a departure from the panel’s normally congenial approach to business. They introduced dozens of amendments over the daylong committee meeting seeking to add funding for various programs. None were adopted.
“The larger Republican reconciliation package will add more than $15 trillion in new debt, gives away $7 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts to the wealthy and slashes access to health care and food assistance for families,” ranking Democrat Rick Larsen of Washington said. “Given that, I think we’re going to have to vote no on the bill before us.”
The vehicle fees, which would be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund that sends highway and transit money to states, created a partisan divide Wednesday.
Federal gas taxes provide the lion’s share of deposits to the fund and Republicans argued that, because drivers of electric vehicles pay no gas taxes and hybrid drivers pay less than those who drive gas-powered cars, the provision would make the contributions fairer.
Republicans scrapped a proposed $20 annual fee on gas-powered cars, which Graves said was meant to “start a conversation” on the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. But the provision “became a political distraction that no longer centered around seriously addressing the problem,” he said.
Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio criticized the vehicle fees, noting Republicans were pursuing additional revenue opportunities to offset losses from tax cuts.
“I don’t know when you guys became the tax-and-spend liberals,” Deluzio told his Republican colleagues. “But I guess the taxing of car owners so you can pay for tax giveaways to billionaires is your new strategy. Good luck with that.”
Federal employee benefits targeted
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted nearly along party lines, 22-21, to send its portion of the reconciliation package to the Budget Committee, with Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner joining Democrats in opposition.
Turner was the first GOP lawmaker to cast a committee vote against reconciliation instructions this year.
The legislation hits at federal employee benefits and comes as the Trump administration continues to overhaul the federal workforce.
Part of the bill would raise federal employees’ required retirement contribution to a rate of 4.4% of their salary and eliminate an additional retirement annuity payment for federal employees who retire before the age of 62, while cutting more than $50 billion from the federal deficit.
At his committee’s markup, Chairman James Comer said the legislation “advances important budgetary reforms that will save taxpayers money.”
The Kentucky Republican acknowledged that the chief investigative committee in the U.S. House has “very limited jurisdiction to help reduce the federal budget deficit,” noting that the panel is “empowered to pursue civil service reforms, including federal employee benefits and reining in the influence of partisan and unaccountable government employee unions.”
But Democrats on the panel blasted the committee’s portion of the reconciliation package, saying the bill chips away at federal employees’ protections.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, the top Democrat on the panel, said congressional Republicans instructed the panel to target the federal workforce with roughly $50 billion in funding cuts “regardless of the impact on hard-working, loyal federal employees and their critical services that they provide to the American people.”
The Massachusetts Democrat said the bill “threatens to further undermine the federal workforce by reducing the take-home pay, the benefits and workforce protections of 2.4 million federal employees, most of whom are middle-class Americans and a third of whom are military veterans.”
Ohio’s Turner, who voted against the legislation because of the provision reducing pension benefits, said he supported the overall reconciliation package and hoped the pension measure would be stripped before a floor vote.
Turner said “making changes to pension retirement benefits in the middle of someone’s employment is wrong.”
This post was originally authored and published by Ariana Figueroa, Ashley Murray, Jacob Fischler, Shauneen Miranda from Georgia Recorder via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
