At 4:42 in the morning on June 5, 2026, the Senate did something with your money that most people were asleep for. By a vote of 52 to 47, Republicans passed S. 2 — the so-called "Secure America Act" — a bill that hands nearly $70 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. The House followed a few days later, and President Trump signed it into law.

That's not a typo. Seventy billion dollars — on top of the mass-deportation money Congress already approved less than a year ago. Combined, the two laws commit nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars to arrests, detention, and deportations. It's roughly eight years of ICE funding, dumped in all at once.

Where the money goes

The breakdown is staggering:

• $38 billion to ICE to expand arrests, detention, deportation operations, and partnerships with state and local police.
• $26 billion to Customs and Border Protection to hire agents and expand surveillance and enforcement.
• $5 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for more deportation and detention work.

ICE now has more money than most militaries around the world. And this money doesn't just keep the agency running at its old size — it's designed to scale enforcement up nationwide and lock in mass-deportation spending through the end of the current administration.

No guardrails — on purpose

Here's the part that should worry everyone, no matter how you feel about immigration. Republicans didn't pass this through the normal, bipartisan appropriations process. They used budget reconciliation to jam it through on party lines — which let them strip out the basic guardrails that come with regular funding bills: required oversight of detention conditions, transparency rules forcing ICE to report basic data to the public, and civil-rights protections in enforcement.

This law includes none of those. It's tens of billions of dollars with no strings attached, handed to an agency at a moment when, in the same year, two American citizens were killed by ICE, multiple people have died in the agency's custody this year — and detainees are holding hunger strikes over the conditions they face.

A slush fund for political payback

Hours before the first Senate vote, Republicans quietly added Section 202(9): $350 million set aside for ICE to carry out enforcement in cities and states that DHS decides are "non-cooperating" — places that decline to sign 287(g) agreements or don't meet vague, shifting federal "compliance" standards.

In plain English, Congress just funded immigration enforcement as a tool of political retaliation, aimed at communities based on their local politics. The provision also expands who ICE can target with the money — including people once charged with unauthorized entry even after the charges were dropped, and people flagged for almost any minor offense. That's a machine that can sweep up longtime residents, asylum seekers, and even U.S. citizens wrongly identified as noncitizens.

The senators who voted yes

Fifty-two Republican senators voted for this. All but one of the chamber's Republicans went along with it. Fourteen of them have report cards on this site:

• Alabama — Tommy Tuberville
• Alaska — Dan Sullivan
• Arkansas — Tom Cotton
• Florida — Ashley Moody
• Idaho — Jim Risch
• Kansas — Roger Marshall
• Maine — Susan Collins
• Mississippi — Cindy Hyde-Smith
• Nebraska — Pete Ricketts
• Ohio — Jon Husted
• South Dakota — Mike Rounds
• Tennessee — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty
• West Virginia — Shelley Moore Capito

Every one of them cast a Yea on final passage. Not one demanded the oversight, transparency, or civil-rights protections that normal funding bills carry. They voted to write a blank check.

And they're not done. Even with this law barely on the books, House Republicans are already drafting tens of billions more for ICE and CBP in the next spending bill. The $70 billion isn't a one-time deal — it's the new baseline.

Meanwhile, families across the country are struggling to afford health care, food, and housing. Congress had a choice about where to put a quarter-trillion dollars. These senators chose this.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 163 on S. 2, June 5, 2026.