After a marathon overnight voting session, the Senate on Thursday morning approved a budget resolution on a near party-line vote to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection, bypassing Democratic objections in hopes of ending the monthslong shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security.
The measure was approved 50-48 — with Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski siding with Democrats in opposition — and it now moves to the House, where its future is uncertain.
The Senate’s budget plan directs up to $140 billion to keep the agencies running for more than three more years — through the end of President Donald Trump’s term. While that’s the higher end of the price tag, the package is expected to cost between $70 billion and $80 billion.
Trump has requested a DHS budget on his desk by June 1. The short timeline spurred Republican leaders to keep the bill as narrow as possible, a decision that garnered some pushback on both sides.
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Senate adoption of the budget blueprint is the first step of the reconciliation process — which bypasses the Senate’s usual 60-vote threshold to advance legislation — and followed a lengthy vote-a-rama, which started after 9 p.m. Wednesday. Senators offered a slew of amendments related to the budget resolution during the overnight session.
Some Republicans felt that Senate leaders were making a political mistake by not including legislation to tackle the affordability crisis and tried to tack on provisions to address the rising cost of living during the voting spree.
Sen. John Kennedy told reporters ahead of the votes that he had hoped to convince Senate Republicans to coalesce around a couple of affordability provisions and include them in the final passage of the bill. The start of the vote-a-rama was delayed after Kennedy blocked its start due to his concerns about the limited scope of the bill, and the Senate ultimately rejected his bid to add parts of the SAVE America Act to the budget blueprint.
“I don’t think that we ought to open the reconciliation bill wide-open,” Kennedy told reporters before the vote. “But I think that if we all try to adult real hard, we can come up with two or three things that would help the American people, that we could agree on. And that’s where I’m headed.”
Murkowski, who ultimately voted against the bill, introduced an amendment that would limit funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to one year. Murkowski, an appropriator, said she had concerns about taking those agencies out of the annual process of appropriating funds.
Democrats pushed the affordability message with a barrage of related amendments overnight. Democrat leaders told reporters before the vote that they planned to force Republicans to cast votes on issues like health care and energy costs — key components of their midterm messaging as they try to seize control of both the House and the Senate.
“This will be a reconciliation of contrast, and we are relishing that fight,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday morning. “Republicans want to shell out billions of dollars to Donald Trump’s private army without any common sense restraints or reforms. Democrats want to put money in people’s pockets by lowering their costs of electricity and of gas and of housing, of health care, of food.”
Those cost-of-living measures did garner some Republican support. Sens. Susan Collins and Dan Sullivan, who are both facing difficult 2026 challengers, voted for Democratic measures to reverse cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, limit health care costs and finance school lunches. Sen. Josh Hawley joined them in supporting a provision aimed at lowering drug prices.
Without a congressionally approved budget, DHS has been shut down for a record-breaking 69 days. Senate Democrats had blocked funding for the agencies while seeking reforms following the killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis by immigration enforcement agents.
A twice-passed Senate bill to fund the rest of DHS — sans money for ICE and Customs and Border Protection — has been languishing in the House for several weeks. Speaker Mike Johnson had previously told reporters he would not move to pass it until he received the party-line bill to fund ICE and CBP, though its support within the conference remains unclear.
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