Senate scraps border and ICE funding vote
Fox News chief congressional correspondent Chad Pergram reports on the pushback against President Donald Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization fund’ on ‘The Bottom Line.’
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Senate Republicans managed to stitch together a unified front to advance President Donald Trump’s roughly $70 billion immigration enforcement package, but divisions over the president’s agenda were laid bare after a marathon day of votes.
Passage of the budget reconciliation package geared toward funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol for the next three and a half years closes a long, drawn out chapter in the Senate that began during the longest shutdown in history.
It’s a point that Senate Republicans tried to return to throughout the day, reiterating that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Democrats had forced their hands after refusing to fund immigration operations without a plethora of reforms.
DOZEN GOP REBELS FAIL TO PERMANENTLY KILL TRUMP’S CONTROVERSIAL $2B FUND
President Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2026. (Mandel Ngan/AFP)
“Democrats would not agree to anything, and eventually they walked away altogether, presumably because they thought that it would serve them better to have an issue for November,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said.
But the day, and preceding weeks, were dominated by a growing rift between Senate Republicans and the Trump administration that threatened to blow up the process altogether.
First, it was the inclusion of $1 billion in funding for security upgrades to Trump’s ballroom, which was later stripped out.
Then, it was the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) announcement that a nearly $2 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was being launched to allow people who felt targeted by the government to make a claim from the pot of taxpayer money.
