Senate Republicans abruptly left Washington on Thursday without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies, postponing action until after the Memorial Day recess amid an internal party rift over a newly created settlement fund for individuals who claim they were politically prosecuted. The decision followed a tense morning meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who briefed senators on the fund, and it threatens to blow past President Donald Trump’s self-imposed June 1 deadline for the legislation.
The core of the conflict is a $1.776 billion fund the Justice Department announced earlier this week. It is designed to pay settlements to people who can demonstrate that they were targeted by a weaponized legal system — a category the administration has used to describe Trump supporters charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Several senators balked at the prospect that taxpayer money could go to individuals convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers that day. The Associated Press reported that the fund “prompted even more questions, spurring a push to limit the taxpayer dollars that some feared could go to Trump supporters who harmed law enforcement officers” in the riot.
That resistance was the breaking point in a bill whose path was already narrowing. Days earlier, Republican senators had stripped $1 billion in security funding for the White House complex and for a ballroom on Trump’s property, a provision that had drawn criticism as a personal rather than governmental expense. The removal came after members of their own party questioned why immigration enforcement legislation should carry a pricey upgrade to the president’s private spaces.
The Thursday meeting with Blanche did not calm the waters. According to the AP, the session “only heightened the frustration among senators,” and shortly afterward Republican leaders announced they would not bring the immigration bill to a vote until they returned from the Memorial Day recess, sometime during the week of June 1 — the same week Trump had demanded its passage. The delay left Homeland Security agencies without the funding they need to maintain current enforcement operations, and it exposed a legislative dynamic in which Trump’s own party is, in the words of one wire report, “pushed to the limit” and showing “rare defiance” to his demands.
Congressional aides said the settlement fund remained the main sticking point, though several senators also expressed reservations about the overall cost of the immigration enforcement package and the White House’s insistence that it move on an accelerated schedule. No Democrats supported the original bill, meaning Republicans needed near-unanimity within their conference. With the settlement fund unresolved and the ballroom security provision already dead, party leaders lacked the votes to proceed.
The standoff now pivots to behind-the-scenes negotiations over the recess. Republican senators face a choice between accepting a fund that critics say rewards Jan. 6 offenders or holding up the signature immigration enforcement bill the president campaigned on — a dilemma that, if unresolved, will leave border and interior enforcement agencies running on stopgap funding past the June 1 deadline.