Senate Budget Committee proposes record funding for immigration enforcement

On February 7, 2025, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina revealed the Senate’s FY2025 Budget Resolution that previews the immigration provisions we might see in the upcoming “Reconciliation” process to pass budget-related reforms. Reconciliation gives the House a chance to put together a package that can pass through the Senate with a simple majority (as opposed to the usual 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster).

Graham, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, released the text of the Senate’s Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Resolution, which includes a record $175 billion in funding for border fencing, and for infrastructure to support immigration enforcement in the interior, including detention and removal, and also programs like 287(g) that enhance state and local cooperation with federal immigration agencies.

According to the press release, the resolution provides funding to:

• Finish the wall and upgrade technology for ground and aerial support.
• Increase the number of detention beds so dangerous criminals aren’t released into the United States.
• Increase the number of ICE officers to conduct mass detention and removal of criminal illegal aliens; Border Patrol agents to regain operational control of the border; Assistant U.S. attorneys to prosecute violent crime, organized crime and immigration-related offenses; and immigration judges to clear the backlog in our immigration courts.
• Make investments in state and local law enforcement to facilitate cooperation with federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement and removal efforts.

Enforcement infrastructure

The budget is aimed at providing the infrastructure necessary to reverse the record wave of illegal immigration that occurred between 2021-2025. The Senate Budget Committee itemized the scope of the challenge:

• Over the past four years there were:
  • Over 8.3 million encounters with illegal aliens on the southern border
  • Over 4 million of these have been released into the United States.
  • 1.7 million of these were encounters with “special interest aliens” — people from countries that DHS has determined pose the greatest national security and counterintelligence threats to the U.S., including Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Turkey.
  • 703 encounters with aliens on the terror watchlist, and at least 99 of those were released into the U.S.
  • Over 1.7 million gotaways — aliens that are known to have entered without ever being encountered or apprehended by law enforcement.
• Currently, there are:
  • 7.6 million aliens on ICE’s “non-detained docket” — illegal immigrants who can be deported but are not currently in ICE custody — and 40,123 aliens currently detained by ICE.
  • This includes 1.4 million aliens already subject to final orders of removal.
  • This also includes 662,586 aliens with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.