When border security provisions were stripped from the national security supplemental bill in the Senate last week because of Republican opposition, a doomsday clock began ticking for cities struggling to cope with an influx of migrants and federal agencies bracing for a new surge at the border.
Two Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now forecasting a budget shortfall of over $500 million unless Congress takes action. Other areas of the department, including Customs and Border Protection, are facing similar shortfalls, they said.
At that rate, key areas of ICE operations could run out of money by May, the officials said.
Under the bipartisan border deal, DHS was supposed to get more than $15 billion to do things Republicans had demanded, such as deporting more migrants and stopping fentanyl smuggling.
Without the new funding, the agency will not only be unprepared to deal with a rapid increase in migrant flow across the border, but it will also be unable to maintain the status quo, two DHS officials told NBC News. The officials said DHS agencies will soon have to move resources from other areas to scrape by.
Cities such as Chicago, New York, Denver, Los Angeles and Boston, where the numbers of newly arrived migrants have exploded, were going to get $1.4 billion from the bill to help them cope.
Democratic mayors of those cities had repeatedly pleaded with the Biden administration for more help to house and educate, provide medical care for and find work authorization for the tens of thousands of new migrants who have arrived since summer 2022, some of them shipped north by Republican governors. The aid was part of the bipartisan border security deal negotiated by Republicans and Democrats over many months but killed by Republicans last week.
The federal government has doled out $370 million to the cities, but they have not received federal support since last fall, and without more congressional funding, a DHS spokesperson said, “cities and communities along the border and in the interior of the United States where migrants are awaiting their immigration court proceedings would suffer.” Congress’ failure to pass the supplemental “will put at risk DHS’s current removal operations, put further strain on our already overtaxed workforce, and make it harder to catch fentanyl at ports of entry. Without adequate funding for CBP, ICE, and USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services),, the Department will have to reprogram or pull resources from other efforts,” a DHS spokesperson said.
Fewer arrests, fewer deportations
At the southwest border, meanwhile, the federal agencies will not have enough money for needed new hires, and there will be fewer arrests, detentions and deportations of immigrants.
The bill would have included $7.6 billion for ICE and it would have dramatically increased detention space for migrants.
Now not only will ICE be unable to increase detention space, but it will also have to carry out fewer deportations than it has in the past year, when deportations nearly doubled from the previous year to 142,580. It may be unable to deport many migrants who already have final orders of deportation.
“A reduction in ICE operations would significantly harm border security, national security and public safety,” a DHS spokesperson said.
Estimates of the exact dollar amounts DHS would need to maintain the status quo have varied, depending on different projections for how high border crossings may surge.
In spring 2023, ICE warned that the number of migrants crossing daily could rise to 14,000, which would have led it to run out of money as soon as July. Numbers never reached that level in spring 2023. In December, however, they reached more than 12,000 per day, a record, straining the resources of ICE, as well as Customs and Border Protection, whose Border Patrol agents are responsible for apprehending and processing migrants.
CBP has long faced challenges recruiting new agents and officers. The bill asked for nearly $6.8 billion for CBP, of which $723 million was for new hires. Instead, CBP will now need to “repurpose funds, while drawing back operations in non-essential areas,” the DHS spokesperson said.
The repurposing is likely to include pulling back on investments in technology to better detect migrants along the border and detect fentanyl coming in vehicles across ports of entry, DHS said.
Immigrants coming into the U.S. through legal means will also feel the effects of the DHS funding drain.
Without the needed funds, USCIS will have to reallocate personnel to screen migrants crossing the border for asylum while taking them away from adjudicating green card applications, the DHS spokesperson said.
