WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan and budget director Russ Vought met with Senate Republicans Tuesday afternoon and pleaded with them to send the administration more money to carry out their immigration crackdown plans.
“Tom Homan said, ‘I am begging you for money,’” Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters afterward. “Russ Vought said that ‘We’re running out of money for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. We can’t rob other accounts any longer.’”
Graham said the Trump administration is asking for an additional $175 billion for immigration enforcement, including ICE agents, detention beds and deportation resources.
That price tag has gone up. Prior to Trump’s inauguration, Republicans were discussing $80 billion to $100 billion for immigration enforcement funding. Last week, Graham said it’d be around $150 billion. On Tuesday, he embraced the $175 billion figure.
Graham made the remarks as the Senate Budget Committee he chairs eyes a hearing and vote on a budget resolution Wednesday and Thursday to begin the “reconciliation” process where Republicans can pass the funding without Democratic votes. He also plans to approve $150 billion to expand military spending.
The move puts the Senate on a collision course with the House, which announced its own markup for Thursday on a different kind of budget resolution: One that also includes a major tax overhaul, which Senate Republicans want to deal with separately, in another bill.
House Republican leaders want to pass Trump’s entire party-line agenda in one bill, fearing that the parts that are left out in the first package will fail to get enough support later in the year, given the wafer-thin House margin of 218-215. The Senate wants to break it up.
Congress cannot officially begin work on the package until both the House and Senate pass identical budget resolutions.
“To my friends in the House: We’re moving because we have to. I wish you the best. I want ‘one big, beautiful bill’ — but I cannot, and I will not go back to South Carolina and justify not supporting the president’s immigration plan,” Graham told reporters. “We’re not building a wall, folks. We’re hitting a wall. They need the money, and they need it now.”
Notably, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his allies still haven’t released the text of the budget resolution as he struggles to unify his fractious conference around a massive package. He’s trying to convey that his chamber is making progress in a bid to avoid getting jammed by Senate Republicans, who have a larger majority of 53-47.
“We’ll be rolling out the details of that, probably by tonight,” Johnson told reporters after a House GOP meeting Tuesday. “And we are right on the schedule that we need to be on.”
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the House Budget Committee, told NBC News “we’ll see” when asked if they can reach a deal by Thursday when the markup is scheduled to take place.
“There’s still a lot of variables left unanswered,” he said.
The far-right House Freedom Caucus is skeptical of Johnson’s one-bill strategy, instead proposing its own two-track process that tackles immigration money first.
“My understanding is that last week that they ran out of detention beds,” Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., the chair of the Freedom Caucus, said in an interview. “So we’re not going to be able to repatriate the illegal alien criminals who are in our communities.”
Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chair of the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee and a vocal proponent of the one-bill strategy, said the deficit increase for his panel under a budget resolution would have to be more than $4.7 trillion to achieve their tax priorities.
“According to [the Congressional Budget Office], in order to do a 10-year extension of just the expiring tax cuts, is over $4.7 trillion,” Smith told reporters, referring to the 2017 Trump tax law.
Trump has largely steered clear of the intra-party clash over how to go about his agenda, indicating a preference for one bill but also making clear he’d be fine with breaking it up into two.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said Tuesday that it’s a mixed message.
“It’s unclear to me where the White House is now,” Hawley said after the meeting with Homan and Vought. “The president says he wants one bill. It’s unclear to me from these guys if they want one bill. I think they want funding.”
