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Congressional Daily Record
This section covers nominations, confirmations, or other executive branch business. It mentions members such as Patty Murray.
Official title: Appropriations (Executive Session)
Issued
April 16, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, we are nearly done with our fiscal year 2026 spending bills. It has been a long road—no question—and we still have some serious disagreements around reforms and funding for ICE and Border Patrol, which I will speak to in a minute, but despite the major challenges, we accomplished something important in passing 11 and, hopefully soon, 12 of our funding bills.
on. We protected crucial investments that people count on every day, and we took some important steps to reassert Congress' power of the purse. That matters immensely. We would almost be there on the Homeland appropriations bill if it were not for Speaker Johnson. Despite the Senate unanimously passing a bill—twice, in fact—to fund the parts of DHS we can agree on while continuing to work on the areas of disagreement when it comes to ICE and Border Patrol, Speaker Johnson and the House Republicans have refused to put the bill up for a vote. They have chosen to needlessly extend the DHS shutdown, making it the longest shutdown in history. House Republicans need to stop holding disaster relief hostage and put that bill up for a vote. We know it will pass overwhelmingly.
the fact that the reason we find ourselves in this mess is that, last summer, in their “Big Ugly Bill,” Republicans did an end run around the bipartisan appropriations process and handed ICE and Border Patrol vastly more money than they receive each year. They gave ICE $75 billion, the CBP $65 billion, and even more funding on top of that for the Secretary to tap however they would like. All told, Republicans signed off on over $160 billion in funding for Trump's mass deportation campaign at DHS. That is nearly three times the entire Department's annual budget, and they did so with virtually no guardrails.
We all know what happened next. President Trump and Stephen Miller built ICE and Border Patrol up into untrained paramilitary forces and sent them out to terrorize communities across the country. American citizens were wrongfully detained. Peaceful protesters were teargassed, tackled to the ground, and pepper-sprayed for no reason. Windows and doors were smashed in by masked agents with no warrants and no IDs. Of course, American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot by Federal agents and slandered by the Trump administration.
more funding for their Agencies until that happens; but after weeks of very tough negotiations, Republicans ultimately refused to agree on some very basic reforms, including reforms that the White House had, by the way, already agreed to. Now, while they continue refusing those commonsense reforms, Republicans are, once again, vowing to give ICE and the Border Patrol even more money, without any accountability. That is right. After America spoke out, demanding more accountability, Republicans are actually doing less accountability.
ICE and Border Patrol for the rest of Trump's term, with none of the accountability measures we regularly include in our annual spending bills. By pursuing this path, they are intentionally walking away from the reforms that we were negotiating over, and on top of that, they will not include longstanding legacy guardrails that have been bipartisan when it comes to DHS funding.
So let's be crystal clear about what that means: Republicans are now choosing to cut another blank check for these Agencies and to forfeit Congress' ability to put checks on them for the next 3 years.
terrorize American cities and communities, Democrats will have no part of it, and we will fight them every step of the way. But if they are ready to get serious about reforms—and ICE needs a heck of a lot more than another money bomb—Democrats are at the table, ready to rein in those rogue Agencies.
year 2027 budget request, which he did over the recess, we are kicking off the fiscal year 2027 appropriations process in earnest with hearings in the