The Case for Keeping ICE and CBP Defunded by Ryan Cooper

[justaprogressive]

Senate Democrats, somewhat to my surprise, have held the line and refused to support funding the Department of Homeland Security in budget negotiations, and so funding ran out on Friday. As my colleague Robert Kuttner reports, Democrats offered Republicans a bargain of funding everything else in the department except ICE and CBP as negotiations continued on immigration enforcement reforms, but they refused.

Now, this does not mean ICE and CBP now have no money. The agencies got a tremendous one-off dollop as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, which gave ICE, at $75 billion, more than seven times its annual budget and more money than any military in the world except for China’s and America’s. CBP received tens of billions of dollars in its own right. And both agencies can draw on this money to continue operations during a shutdown.

That said, denying baseline annual funding is still a substantial cut for ICE and CBP, and the longer it persists, the deeper the funding reduction will be. Democrats should stick to this line. As long as Trump is in office, these agencies should get no funding through the traditional budget whatsoever. After all, they already have more than they need.

As an initial matter, Republicans have already pulled exactly this same move with the IRS. The Inflation Reduction Act had $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS, both to help the agency modernize its severely outdated IT infrastructure and also to conduct resource-intensive audits of rich people.

Republicans were absolutely apoplectic about this, because a large share of GOP voters and donors, and the party’s appointees and staff, as well as Republican elected officials themselves, are wealthy tax cheats. So when the GOP won control of the House in 2022, each time the budget process came up they demanded a pound of IRS flesh from the normal appropriation, thus canceling out a chunk of the extra cash. As my colleague David Dayen explained last month, after several rounds of this, just $10 billion of the funding is left. Lo, there was much rejoicing from the nation’s right-wing boat dealership owners, who could make their fraudulent deductions in peace.

https://prospect.org/2026/02/16/ice-cbp-defund-homeland-security-democrats-congress/

[sakabatou]

1. K&R

[Boo1]

2. Ryan Cooper

Just couldn't resist attacking democrats, even while admitting they were doing exactly what he wanted them too.

He can fuck off with the rest of prospect.