By Julia Ainsley -
NBC News
When the border security measures included in the bipartisan bill processed (and later approved) by the Senate to help Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan were eliminated last week (by the Republican bloc), a Day of the Day clock started ticking. Final Judgment in the federal agencies that are in charge of managing immigration and in the cities that receive the thousands of asylum seekers sent from the border.
Two Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told NBC News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) expects to suffer a budget shortfall of
more than $500 million. dollars
unless Congress takes action.
Other areas of DHS, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP), face similar deficits, they further stated.
If Congress does not remedy it, key areas of ICE operations could run out of money by May, officials said.
Border Patrol agents speak with migrants seeking asylum at a camp after crossing the border from Mexico on Friday, February 2, 2024, near Jacumba, California. Gregory Bull / AP
Under the bipartisan deal blocked by Republicans, DHS was to receive more than $15 billion to act precisely as Republicans had demanded, such as deporting more immigrants and curbing fentanyl trafficking.
Without the new funding, the agency will not only be unprepared to deal with a rapid increase in the flow of migrants across the border, but it will also be unable to maintain the current pace of work, two DHS officials told NBC News, who They added that other DHS agencies will soon
have to receive resources from other areas to survive.
Cities like Chicago, New York, Denver, Los Angeles and Boston, where the number of newly arrived asylum seekers has skyrocketed, were set to receive $1.4 billion under that bill to help them cope with the social crisis. .
The Democratic mayors of those cities had begged the government of fellow Democrat Joe Biden for more help to house and educate, provide medical care and find work authorization for the tens of thousands of new migrants who have arrived since the summer of 2022,
many of them sent north by Republican governors.
The federal government has transferred $370 million to those cities, but they have received no federal support since the fall, and without more funding from Congress, a DHS spokesperson said, “cities and communities along the border and in the interior, where immigrants are awaiting their immigration court proceedings, would suffer.”
Failure by Congress to approve the supplement “will jeopardize current DHS expulsion operations, put further strain on our already overburdened workforce, and make it more difficult to capture fentanyl at ports of entry.”
Without adequate funding for CBP, ICE and USCIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services), DHS will have to reprogram or withdraw resources from other activities,” stated a spokesperson for the federal department.
Fewer arrests, fewer deportations
The bill included $7.6 billion for ICE and would have dramatically increased places in immigration detention centers.
If these funds, on the southwest border the agencies will not have enough money for new hires necessary to address the crisis, and there will be fewer arrests and deportations than last year (when they almost doubled compared to 2022).
You may not even be able to deport many immigrants who already have final orders removed from the country.
“A reduction in ICE operations would significantly harm border security, national security and public safety,” a DHS spokesperson told NBC News.
[USA. reports a drop in illegal border crossings after Mexico resumed actions to stop migrants]
In spring 2023, ICE warned that the number of migrants crossing the border daily could reach 14,000, which would have led it to run out of money as early as July.
The numbers never reached that range in the spring of 2023. In December, however, they reached more than 12,000 a day, a record, straining the resources of ICE, as well as CBP, whose Border Patrol agents are responsible for stop and prosecute them.
CBP has long faced difficulties hiring agents.
The failed bill allocated almost $6.8 billion, of which $723 would go to new hiring.
Instead, it will now have to “reallocate funds, while reducing operations in non-essential areas,” the spokesperson said.
The reallocation is likely to include reducing investments in technology to better detect migrants along the border and fentanyl arriving by vehicle through ports of entry, DHS said.
Newly arrived migrants at O'Hare International Airport on August 31, 2023. Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images file
Immigrants who enter the US legally will also suffer the effects.
Without the necessary funding, USCIS will have to reassign staff to screen immigrants who cross the border seeking asylum, which will take time away from processing green card applications, the DHS spokesperson said.
[The Washington Post reported this Wednesday that ICE is already circulating an internal proposal to release thousands of migrants and significantly reduce their places in detention centers from 38,000 to 22,000 beds due to this lack of funds, according to four sources anonymous from ICE and DHS.]