Thune: Republicans to keep GOP-only bill to fund border security ‘as narrow as possible’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on Thursday said he suspects that Republicans will try to keep a GOP-only bill to fund border security operations “as narrow as possible” so Republicans can meet President Trump’s June 1 deadline to pass the bill.

“Everybody is, I think, singularly focused …. around the things we have to do on the border, on ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP [Customs and Border Protection],” Thune told reporters on Thursday morning. 

“The other things implicate other committees and create jurisdictional challenges and germane issues on the floor,” Thune said. “Our theory of the case behind all this was to keep that thing as narrow and focused as possible, and that maximizes, I think, the speed at which we can do it and the support for it.”

His comments come as lawmakers face uncertainty about what such a bill could look like. Republicans have discussed using one of their couple remaining chances to pass a GOP-only measure, which uses a tool known as budget reconciliation to sidestep a Senate filibuster, to address a host of other priorities. 

Those priorities include voting reforms inspired by the SAVE America Act and supplemental funding for the Pentagon due to the Iran war, as well as using reconciliation to enact cuts and reforms to federal assistance programs with the stated aim of rooting out fraud.

But Thune, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), and Trump said Wednesday that they hope to use reconciliation to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol as the second step in a two-step process to end the record-setting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown. 

The Senate has passed a bipartisan bill to fund the bulk of DHS that does not include funding for border security operations, after they were unable to come to an agreement on immigration enforcement reforms with Democrats who have refused to vote for such funding otherwise. That bill now awaits House passage.

“There will probably be some attempts to add things There are things out there that obviously, many of us are interested in,” Thune said of a reconciliation bill, but said a reconciliation bill to fund ICE and border security “is probably not a likely magnet for all these other issues.”

The budget reconciliation process bypasses the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, allowing the Republican trifecta to pass budget-related legislation without facing the threat of a Democratic filibuster. But the process can be used a limited number of times in a fiscal year. After passing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” of tax cut and spending priorities last year, Republicans have said they have two more chances to use reconciliation in this Congress.

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