Adam Isacson

Adam Isacson

Director for Defense Oversight

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With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

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Due to staff travel, we will produce no Border Updates for the next two weeks. Updates will resume on June 13, 2025.

Shortly before 3:00 AM on May 22, the full House of Representatives took up and began debating H.R. 1, an enormous package of tax cuts, deep cuts to social programs, and mammoth increases in spending to harden the U.S.-Mexico border and multiply interior migration enforcement. Shortly before 7:00 AM, the House passed the bill by a 215-214 vote, with all Democrats and two Republicans voting against.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) overcame internal disagreements on taxation and spending (unrelated to the border and migration) within the chamber’s Republican majority, and forced the vote through about a day earlier than expected.

The bill would create a long list of steep fees that applicants for asylum, Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, and other immigration statuses would have to pay in order to have their cases considered. It would also impose a 5 percent tax on non-citizens’ transfers of overseas remittances.

As noted in past weeks’ Border Updates, the House bill would add more than $160 billion in new spending on border security and interior migration enforcement between now and fiscal 2029. This is a staggering amount: currently, the annual budgets of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) add up to less than $30 billion. It would lavish resources on the Trump administration’s promised “mass deportation” campaign.

The image below summarizes the bill’s many border and migration provisions. (Click it to expand it, and note that its alt text reproduces its contents.)

At the last minute, House leadership added $12 billion to the bill for “State Border Security Reimbursement.” This responds to repeated requests, from Texas’s Republican state government and political leaders, for a federal government payout to reimburse Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” border crackdown, which began in 2021 and has cost Texas taxpayers at least $11 billion.

The bill now goes to the Republican-majority Senate, where under normal procedure, legislation must win 60 out of 100 votes to end debate and move to a final vote—a procedure known as the filibuster. However, this bill is going under a special rule called “reconciliation” that would allow it to pass by a simple majority, without a single Democratic vote, as long as the Senate’s Parliamentarian rules that each of its provisions have direct impact on the federal budget. For this reason, the legislation often gets called the “reconciliation bill.”

The foreseen spending and fees for the border and mass deportation would likely meet that definition. However, in a piece at his Migrant Insider newsletter, Capitol Hill-watcher Pablo Manríquez voiced concern that current Senate leadership might ignore some of the Parliamentarian’s dictates and bend the rules in ways that could allow simple-majority passage of more fundamental changes to immigration law.

The reconciliation bill may not sail easily through the Senate. Key Republicans are already balking at some of the ways the bill would add to the federal deficit. While few Republicans have commented on its border and migration provisions, one important senator has: Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), the libertarian-leaning chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, has criticized the House bill’s $46.5 billion for border wall construction, viewing it as excessive.

Calculating that building a thousand miles of border wall might cost $12 billion, Paul told Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem at a May 20th hearing, “The number’s way off. We can’t just throw $30 billion out there and say ’Things cost a lot.’” Another Homeland Security Committee member, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), told Noem, “Sharpen your pencil. It’s more than you need.”

WOLA published a May 22 analysis of the bill’s contents, using comparisons to other public spending needs and giant projects to show the sheer scale of the bill’s foreseen spending on border security, migrant detention, deportations, CBP and ICE hiring, and Operation Lone Star reimbursement. The bill’s border wall spending, for example, could pay for over a year of universal preschool for all U.S. children; its detention spending could build stadiums for all 30 Major League Baseball teams; its deportation spending could build 18 Empire State Buildings; and its hiring budget could feed 123 million people at risk of famine.

Many other groups have published incisive analyses of the bill’s border and migration provisions: Alianza Americas, American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee, American Immigration Council, American Immigration Lawyers Association,

© WOLA