US Senate passes $70bn immigration bill after clashes over settlement fund

The US Senate passed legislation to fund Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies early Friday, after weeks of delays and fierce backlash to an unrelated $1.776bn settlement fund that threatened to derail the bill.

Senators voted 52-47 to pass the $70bn legislation to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol for the next three years, through the end of Trump’s term, after Democrats have blocked the money for months. The bill will now head to the US House of Representatives, which is expected to take it up next week.

The final vote came just before 5am, after Republicans narrowly defeated multiple attempts by members of both parties to add language to the bill that would permanently ban Trump’s settlement fund for allies who believe they’ve been politically persecuted.

Republicans cleared the last major hurdle overnight when they defeated an amendment proposed by one of their own members, Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, that would have redirected payments from the settlement to members of law enforcement who were injured when a mob of Trump supporters seeking to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 .

The amendments were a test of party unity that complicated what should have been an easy vote for Republicans who wanted to keep the focus on immigration enforcement in an election year. Instead, they spent almost a full day haggling among themselves over whether to block the settlement fund, even after the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, had said earlier this week that it would not go forward.

“This would have been done several hours ago if we weren’t having to deal with some of the issues around the fund,” the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, said shortly before midnight.

Thune himself has criticized the fund, which was part of a settlement that resolves Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leak of his tax returns and has angered many of his GOP colleagues. But he has been pushing GOP senators for weeks to keep the bill focused on the funding for ICE and border patrol and to avoid adding new provisions that could complicate its passage in the House.

Still, a group of Republican senators pushed all day and into the night to block the fund’s payouts through legislation. That effort came after Trump, who has been at odds with the Senate in recent weeks, raised new doubts about the fund’s future on Wednesday – just after the Senate had voted to start debate on the bill – when he told reporters that it is “very important” and said “I don’t know” whether it is dead or on hold.