WASHINGTON — As the Senate crafts a party-line bill to fund immigration enforcement and Border Patrol for the next three years, Alabama’s senators are split on where the focus should lie.
After Democrats refused to fund Immigration Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol without significant guardrails, Republicans are moving forward with using the reconciliation process to fund those agencies on their own.
The budget resolution, the first step of the process, could be on the floor as soon as next week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Tuesday. That, combined with a separate measure to fund the rest of DHS, could bring an end to the two-month-long impasse.
U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., who has been involved in negotiations to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, said Republicans need to keep the GOP bill limited to funding immigration enforcement and Border Patrol.
“I think we have to keep it narrow,” Britt told Alabama Daily News. “I mean, we do.”
She added that she doesn’t want to “leave our law enforcement behind” and “this is one way for us to do that.”
But other Senate Republicans have expressed their support for adding other GOP priorities to the bill, such as the voter ID measure. U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said in an interview on Fox News Business Monday that the reconciliation bill “doesn’t need to be skinny.”
“We need to privatize TSA and pass the Save America Act, just to name a few,” Tuberville posted on X.
But when asked by ADN Tuesday, Tuberville said he’d be open to a “skinny” reconciliation bill if Republicans pursued a third bill afterwards that could include other agenda items. He also acknowledged that expanding the scope of the bill aimed at funding ICE and Border Patrol bill could make it more difficult to pass.
“I can understand what they’re trying to do, trying to get DHS funded, along with TSA, where we can get us out of this bind as quick as we can, and not bloat it to where we’ll be back and forth on everything for a month, two months,” Tuberville told ADN.
“So, (I) understand what they’re trying to do. We should have done this a lot earlier, but if we just do the skinny one, we need to do another one.”
Republicans used the reconciliation process to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, which extended tax cuts and slashed safety net programs. But it took months to hammer out the details and get enough Republicans on board to approve it.
Tuberville also pointed out that adding any SAVE America Act provisions to a party-line bill would be restricted to budgetary items, as Senate rules do not allow “extraneous” provisions that would have little or no impact on the budget.
During his weekly press conference, Thune said the Senate will “move quickly, decisively, and hopefully in a very focused way” to fund the two agencies.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters that Democrats have stood “united and strong” to fund DHS “with the safeguards” such as requiring identification for federal agents and preventing officers from wearing masks.
The House still needs to approve the Senate-passed appropriations bill that funds the rest of the department. It would also need to pass the immigration enforcement reconciliation bill, but it’s uncertain if House Republicans will have enough support to pass both measures.