WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, and budget director, Russell Vought, met with Senate Republicans on 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 Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters. “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.
The price tag has gone up. Before Trump was inaugurated, Republicans were discussing $80 billion to $100 billion for immigration enforcement funding. Last week, Graham said it would be around $150 billion. On Tuesday, he embraced the $175 billion figure.
After the meeting, Homan said his message was “more money, more success.” Asked whether he was worried the administration would run out of money to continue their immigration operations, he replied: “Hopefully, we won’t run out of money. The more money we got, the more bad guys we take off the street, the safer America is.”
The Senate Budget Committee, which Graham chairs, is eyeing a hearing and a vote on a budget resolution Wednesday and Thursday to begin the “reconciliation” process, in which 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 GOP’s wafer-thin House margin of 218-215. The Senate wants to break it up.
Congress can’t officially begin work on the package until both the House and the 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 the House 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 Budget Committee, told NBC News “we’ll see” when he was asked whether 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 would tackle 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 and 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 its 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 intraparty clash over how to go about his agenda, indicating a preference for one bill but also making clear it 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,” he 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.”
