Border enforcement advocates are celebrating after the House and Senate passed a reconciliation package that prevents immigration enforcement from being held hostage to the demands of Democrats.
The $70 billion included in the bill will ensure that both border security via Border Patrol, and interior security from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will be adequately funded through the remainder of the Trump administration.
But there is still work to be done.
Ira Mehlman is media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. He says it is essential to pass H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, to prevent another open-border crisis such as occurred during the Biden administration.
“H.R. 2 systematically closes all the loopholes that were exploited by the Biden administration,” Mehlman advises, “to prevent future administrations from throwing open our borders and causing the kind of chaos we saw during the four years of the Biden administration.”
Introduced in 2023, the Secure the Border Act passed the GOP-controlled House but predictably died in the Senate, which was controlled by Democrats at the time.
When they killed H.R. 2, Democrats refused to take up legislation that would clamp down on asylum claims, a request that is exploited by foreigners to gain entry into the U.S. before their claim is eventually denied. The bill also ends the catch-and-release policy that forced the Border Patrol to release illegals it had detained.
FAIR is urging the Republican Party to pass H.R. 2 while the GOP controls both chambers in Congress.
“It would be subject to getting the 60 votes needed for cloture, which is going to be a heavy lift,” Mehlman conceded. “At the same time, it would put Democrats on the spot.”
Even though that would amount to some political theatre before the midterm elections, Mehlman says the American public doesn’t want to return to the open-border policy of the Biden administration that allowed millions to enter and remain.
Democrats, he said, “would have to justify to the American public why they killed a bill that was really carrying out the will of the American public."
