Voters gave Democrats the House and the Senate partly on a promise to check Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency does not need Congress to pay its bills. Republicans’ 2025 budget law handed ICE $75 billion on top of the roughly $10 billion it normally gets each year, and that money is expected to last through the rest of President Trump’s term.
That is the first fact Black immigrant families should know about the new Congress. Black immigrants were 7.2% of the noncitizen population in 2015 but more than one in five people facing deportation because of a criminal conviction, according to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which says most of those cases begin with local police, not immigration agents. Haitians, Somalis, Nigerians and Jamaicans did not get a vote on how ICE spends its money. Now the people who did are finding out how little the vote bought.
Sam Bagenstos, a former general counsel at the White House budget office, described the 2025 law this way: “Here what we have is just a massive shoveling of cash to an agency with few if any strings.” Annual appropriations are how Congress normally squeezes an agency. This lump sum took that lever away, and a bill to claw it back would face Trump’s veto.
Democrats have two real tools. The first is the subpoena. Rep. Robert Garcia, who is set to chair the House Oversight Committee, posted “LAWYER UP” after the election. Naureen Shah of the ACLU says that is the point: “ICE has to be afraid. They have to be afraid of losing their funding. They have to be afraid of being subpoenaed and asked extremely hard questions before a live audience of the American people.”
The second is conditions on whatever money still has to pass through Congress. Democrats are weighing warrant requirements, a ban on masked agents and limits on enforcement in schools, churches and hospitals. Regular Homeland Security funding bills need 60 votes in the Senate, which gives them a seat at that table.
The administration has answered in advance. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “deportations will continue.” A DHS official called the coming investigations “political shenanigans,” and the White House can slow-walk subpoenas and invoke executive privilege.
The private prison companies are already planning around that. CoreCivic and GEO Group are urging fast expansion of detention space, and CoreCivic’s president, Lucibeth Mayberry, said the administration has “secure funding” and should “move quickly” to buy more.
This is where the paper stands. A party that ran against ICE cannot treat hearings as the finish line. Nine in 10 Black voters backed Democrats, and the test of that loyalty is whether warrants, mask bans and detention limits become conditions that the money cannot dodge. The new Congress is sworn in in January, and the first spending fight comes with it.
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