Congress

House Republicans clear $70B go-it-alone immigration enforcement package

Published

4 hours ago

June 9, 2026

The House passed a nearly $70 billion package Tuesday to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for three years, capping off a four-month partisan standoff.

That bill is now on its way to President Donald Trump’s desk following a 214-212 vote, proving Republicans can ignore Democratic demands to crack down on the administration’s immigration policies and still pump unprecedented funding to the agencies carrying them out.

Following the collapse of negotiations to restrict the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, Republicans harnessed the party-line budget reconciliation process to pass legislation funding ICE and Border Patrol without any Democratic votes. Those faltered talks began after immigration agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January.

The end result is the enactment of supercharged budgets for both agencies — and the guarantee that they will be funded beyond the end of Trump’s presidency.

“Hallelujah — they can’t shut them down now,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) said in an interview Tuesday, referring to Democrats.

On top of the more than $140 billion Republicans gave ICE and Border Patrol as part of last summer’s tax and spending megabill, the legislation cleared Tuesday will pile on about $65 billion more — plus another $5 billion for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to dole out at his discretion.

The annual budgets for those two agencies total about $17 billion combined under the regular government funding process.

“We are asking ICE to not cause chaos and decrease public safety in our neighborhoods. They already got a huge lump sum of money,” Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), a senior House appropriator, said in an interview. “So I think it’s more than fair that we ask for reforms before we give them another penny.”

The monthslong ordeal to fully fund DHS after a 76-day lapse ran adjacent to a major personnel shakeup, with the March ouster of then-Secretary Kristi Noem and subsequent installation of Mullin.

The new secretary told lawmakers this month that DHS agents are now seeking judicial warrants to enter private residences, unless agents are already in the midst of pursuing an individual who then enters a home. Mullin also said that, starting in July, DHS will begin requiring 72 days of training for new immigration officers rather than the 42-day accelerated program the Trump administration has been using.

But Mullin refused to commit to following court orders and dismissed allegations of inhumane treatment at immigration detention centers, after shutting down the independent DHS watchdog last month tasked with investigating abuses at immigrant holding facilities.

He also accused Democrats of hampering months of bipartisan talks around new immigration enforcement policies to save face with liberal voters ahead of the midterm elections.

“You would never get to ‘yes,’ and so we walked away and did reconciliation,” Mullin told Democratic appropriators during a hearing this month.

Defending his party’s posture, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview this week that DHS has “refused to rein in a lawless ICE operation” and noted that he publicly pressed Mullin on why DHS has not been cooperating with local authorities investigating the killings in Minnesota.

Despite what is ostensibly a victory Tuesday for the GOP, not every Republican sees it that way. House Republicans initially revolted against the plan, which originated in the Senate, to clear funding for ICE and Border Patrol through the party-line process while separately joining with Democrats to pass a bill to fund the rest of DHS.

One of those House skeptics said Tuesday that the months of work it took to fund the immigration agencies is testament to the foolhardiness of the plan Senate Republicans embraced.

“The deal in the beginning to split out ICE and Border Patrol should have never happened,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said in an interview. “I knew it when it happened, and this proved it.”

To win enough GOP support for the gambit, House Republican leaders had to convince many of their members that they will get a chance to pass a third party-line package later this year. There’s no consensus GOP agenda for that bill, but groups of Republicans are counting on it to cut taxes, bolster military funding, crack down on fraud in safety net programs and boost programs that bring down costs for Americans ahead of the midterms.

But many Republicans doubt GOP leaders will be able to pull off enactment of another reconciliation package in the coming months, considering the House is only scheduled to be in session for nine weeks before Election Day and Speaker Mike Johnson is increasingly struggling to whip enough support for major legislation with a narrow majority.

Johnson had to make another deal with conservative hard-liners on Tuesday, when he promised a floor vote on legislation codifying Trump’s border policies in order to muscle through a procedural vote on the immigration enforcement package, according to three people with knowledge of the conversations.

Johnson promised the holdouts the vote would take place before July 4 — which is just 11 legislative days away.

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Congress

Sen. Lindsey Graham wins primary over ‘America First’ challenger

Published

6 seconds ago

June 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is on his way to clinching his fifth term in the Senate.

Graham won the Republican primary for Senate on Tuesday, vanquishing five opponents that included businessperson Mark Lynch — who challenged the senator over his staunch support for the war in Iran and long history in Washington. Lynch also drew support from some of the president’s most prominent MAGA Republican critics.

But Graham won more than half the primary vote, allowing him to avoid an embarrassing two-week runoff sprint. He is expected to cruise to victory in November; a Democrat has not represented the state in the Senate since 2005, when longtime Sen. Fritz Hollings chose not to seek reelection.

The four-term senator spent big in the final weeks of the campaign to make sure he won, combining with his allies to spend over $18 million in television and digital ads touting his record and endorsement from President Donald Trump. That spending proved to be decisive in staving off Lynch’s challenge from the right.

He even called in the big guns for a last minute bump, bringing in Trump, who reaffirmed his support for his occasional frenemy in a telerally on the eve of the primary election.

Graham’s success is a loss for the strict “America First” wing of the GOP that has criticized the president’s new interventionist foreign policy streak, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent. They came out in support of Lynch during the final stretch of the campaign, though that was not enough to upset Graham, a fixture of Columbia and Washington politics.

Congress

20 House Republicans cross party lines to pass pro-union bill

Published

2 hours ago

June 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Twenty House Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to help pass a Democratic-led bill Tuesday aimed at making it easier for workers to form unions, widening the divide between a bloc of pro-labor Republicans and GOP leaders.

Democrats successfully used a discharge petition to sidestep Johnson and force the vote with the help of a handful of House Republicans, including Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Nick LaLota of New York.

“It’s passing,” Fitzpatrick said before the vote when asked about Johnson’s efforts to whip Republicans against the bill.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act aims to reduce the amount of time between workers voting to form a union and negotiating their first collectively bargained contract, in part by requiring the parties to more quickly enter federal mediation. It’s the latest in a series of employment bills that pro-union House Republicans have bucked their party on in recent months.

House Education and Workforce Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) spoke out sharply against the bill on the floor Tuesday, saying it would “threaten jobs, kill growth and in some cases, shut business down entirely.” But a hefty subset of Republicans backed the bill nonetheless, joining all voting Democrats.

Congress

Raphael Warnock meets with Mike Johnson after questioning speaker’s Christian faith

Published

5 hours ago

June 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Raphael Warnock met Tuesday with Speaker Mike Johnson after the Republican leader requested the Democratic senator privately discuss comments Warnock made regarding Johnson’s faith in a recent interview.

Warnock was asked in the New York Times Q&A about Johnson praying ahead of the passage last year of the GOP megabill that included tax cuts and reductions in social-service programs and how he “understands that.”

Warnock, the pastor of a prominent Atlanta church, responded that he is a “Matthew 25 Christian,” referencing the chapter of the Gospel where Jesus describes the responsibility of the faithful to treat the hungry, sick and foreign with compassion.

“I don’t understand how you read that, say a long prayer, hold hands with your fellow legislators, and then cut a trillion dollars — $1 trillion — out of Medicaid calling it waste, fraud, and abuse,” Warnock said.

Leaving the meeting in Johnson’s office, Warnock said he raised the very same point personally to the speaker on Tuesday.

“We talked about the policy, and we agreed to disagree,” he said. “But we also talked about our faith and our upbringing, and that, for me, was important because I think just at a human level it would help around this place if we had more authentic conversations across our differences.”

“The stakes are too high for us to be engaged in political fencing around here and not have authentic conversations at a human level about why you believe what you believe,” he continued. “And so I left hopeful that we might have more of that kind of conversation.”

Johnson struck a similar note in a statement: “I was happy to meet with Senator Warnock today and have a positive, fruitful discussion about matters of faith and our different opinions regarding public policy. Such dialogue is important because it is always more productive to have these conversations face to face.”

Warnock and a spokesperson for the speaker both confirmed Johnson requested the meeting after the Times interview was published.

Warnock described the tone of the approximately 30-minute meeting as “honest, candid” and “respectful.” He said that the two men exchanged phone numbers and agreed to stay in touch.

Johnson, a devout evangelical Christian, often talks about his faith as he navigates his slim majority and near-constant GOP infighting. He often cites the Bible and advised President Donald Trump earlier this year to take down a photo from his Truth Social account that depicted Trump as Jesus.

“I think there are people gathered in this building every week who go to church on Sunday,” Warnock said after the meeting. “And I just sometimes wonder what their preacher is preaching about. The gospels that I preach center the poor.”