OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
UPDATE – 2:40 PM – The House of Representatives officially passed a roughly $70 billion budget reconciliation package on Tuesday, securing a major legislative victory that guarantees three years of dedicated funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Clearing the chamber in a razor-thin 214–212 party-line vote, the enforcement package bypassed traditional filibuster hurdles in the Senate through the reconciliation process, effectively cementing long-term fiscal resources for enhanced border operations, detention center expansions, and thousands of new field agents.
Having now successfully cleared both chambers of Congress following an intense final hour of floor debate, the spending bill officially heads to President Trump’s desk, where it is expected to be signed into law.
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12:06 PM- The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Tuesday afternoon on a Republican immigration enforcement bill, a $70 billion legislative package aimed at providing long-term funding for President Donald Trump’s border security priorities.
The measure, known as the Secure America Act (S. 2), arrives in the lower chamber after narrowly clearing the Senate last week in a 52–47 party-line vote. If passed, the bill would represent a major legislative victory for the administration.
The Secure America Act allocates $38 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), $26 billion to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and $5 billion more to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), The Guardian reported.
The legislation utilizes the budget reconciliation process, a maneuver that allowed Senate Republicans to bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Central to the bill is a massive infusion of capital for ICE and CBP, including $9.55 billion specifically earmarked to hire, train, and equip thousands of new Border Patrol agents and support personnel.
Supporters have explained that the funding is essential to sustain the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown through the remainder of the president’s term, providing resources for expanded detention capacity and the construction of additional border wall infrastructure.
Despite the momentum, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faces a razor-thin margin for error.
With nearly unanimous opposition from Democrats, the Speaker requires almost every Republican member to be present for the final vote. However, some members have expressed reservations over the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund included in the bill. This fund is designed to compensate individuals who were unfairly targeted by previous federal investigations under the Biden administration.
While Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche already stated in previous testimony before House appropriators that the administration is “not moving forward with the fund, period,” the political friction over it is still relevant to today’s House vote for a couple of reasons.
- Legislative battleground: Even though Blanche declared the fund dead, Senate Democrats used the budget reconciliation “vote-a-rama” right before sending the bill to the House to force votes specifically aimed at codifying its elimination. Because of how the reconciliation process works, these late-stage floor amendments are still dominating the floor debate on Tuesday.
- Hesitancy: Some members remain frustrated that the fund was ever tied to the $70 billion package in the first place. Democrats are continuing to hammer the bill on the House floor on Tuesday by labeling it as part of a “politicized” legislative push, keeping the phrase very much alive in the current debate.
Nonetheless, the $1.8 billion fund was technically structured under the Justice Department’s umbrella as an administrative/legal settlement move, rather than being explicitly written as a line item inside the core $70 billion DHS funding package itself.
The administration supported a reconciliation package that included both DHS immigration funding and the separate DOJ funding provision, a procedural bundling that Democrats claim is a unified “political agenda” rather than a formally acknowledged conditional agreement. Since the two pieces of policy were born from the same deal, Democrats are treating them as a single, inseparable package. By attacking the GOP’s DOJ fund, they are also working to taint the entire $70 billion immigration bill by association.
Writer’s Note: Essentially, the funds are separate. But if one is looking at how the bill was packaged, how it was debated on the floor, and how it was voted on, they were dependent on one another. That is why mainstream media coverage is treating them as a package deal.
As the House moves toward a final vote expected after 4:30 p.m. ET, the outcome hinges on the GOP’s ability to maintain party discipline against a backdrop of Democrat backlash regarding the future of the U.S. immigration system.
Tuesday’s Schedule:
- 10:30 a.m. PT (1:30 p.m. ET) – First Votes
- 1:30 p.m. PT (4:30 p.m. ET) – Second Votes
- 3:30 p.m. PT (6:30 p.m. ET) – Last Votes – This is when the final vote on the immigration package is scheduled to wrap up.
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