Here's The Terrible Thing Republicans Funded at 5 a.m.
ICE funding receives little attention from the mainstream media, but we're not looking away.
Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, looking forward to filling you in on the events of the week.
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The Vote They Held at Five in the Morning
This week, while most of the country slept, Senate Republicans endorsed ICE’s killings. Stripped of euphemism, that’s what Friday’s vote was.
Just before 5 a.m., on a 52-47 party-line vote, Republicans passed roughly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Border Patrol. They did it in the dark, without anyone to report on it. By the time you reached for your morning news, it was done.
That timing isn’t an accident. The safest hour to do an indefensible thing is the one when the fewest Americans are awake to see it.
Remember why this fight existed. Democrats sought protections to stop ICE’s cold-blooded killings, both of immigrants and of U.S. citizen protesters.
Homeland Security went unfunded because federal agents shot and killed people, including protesters like Alex Pretti, whose killing pulled me back into this work. Democrats refused to write a blank check to the agency that did that. They asked for reasonable guardrails: judicial warrants before agents drag people off the street, an end to masked agents operating without identification, and limits on targeting the protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.
These weren’t radical demands. They were trying to stop Trump’s army from turning into an extrajudicial force.
Republicans accepted none of it. And the media went right along, and barely reported on it at all. Did you hear the details of what happened Friday at 5 a.m.? I didn’t. I had to research the news for this column.
No warrant requirement. No ban on masks. No protection for protesters. Three years of money, no strings attached, for the agency that killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
It gets worse. ICE and Border Patrol weren’t broke. By most estimates, roughly $150 billion of the enforcement money Congress handed them just last year is still sitting unspent.
They’re not running on empty. They’re sitting on a mountain of cash. And Republicans piled another $70 billion on top anyway.
Republicans moved this through reconciliation, the maneuver that dodges the filibuster. By doing this, they locked in funding for multiple years. Because they bypassed the normal annual budget process, Congress can’t revisit it next year. They can’t attach conditions or claw back money, no matter what ICE agents do between now and 2029.
If the abuses continue, there’s no funding switch left to flip. Republicans funded ICE’s brutal, unaccountable behavior and threw away the switch. On purpose.
The corporate press buried this story. We focused on it because we’re not compromised. Readers fund us, not billionaires. If that’s the journalism you want, I need you with us. Please support independent media by upgrading your subscription today.
Want to Fight Back? Here’s How
Here’s what you can actually do about it. ICE is in the middle of the largest detention buildout in American history — a plan to convert as many as 23 commercial warehouses into mega-jails holding up to 96,000 people.
The thing they don’t advertise is how much of this depends on local cooperation: these deals run through local property records, zoning boards, utility hookups, and permitting, and they’re already drawing protests in nearly two dozen communities. Local officials have leverage over land use, infrastructure, and inspections, and public pressure is what moves them to use it.
The most powerful thing you can do is local. Find out whether a warehouse near you has been bought or rezoned. Groups like the American Immigration Council and the ACLU are tracking the purchases (here) and (here). The ACLU is also taking donations for their immigration fights.
Show up to city council and county commission meetings where these sites get approved. These rooms are often empty and a single organized turnout can change a vote. The administration is betting you’ll assume this is out of your hands, but every one of these facilities has to be built somewhere specific, and communities have stopped them before.
This has already worked. In deep-red Oklahoma City, Mississippi, Kansas City, and Salt Lake City, warehouse owners pulled out of deals or DHS backed off entirely after communities mobilized. The pressure got so intense across the country that the new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, has reportedly paused and is reviewing the entire warehouse plan after roughly $1 billion was already spent. That’s what showing up looks like when it works.
But the Dam Is Starting to Crack
Rank-and-file Republicans are starting to break ranks with Trump.
Start with Iran. The House passed a war powers resolution to block Trump from ordering further strikes — the first time such a measure has cleared either chamber since the war began. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to make it happen. While it’s dead in the Senate, it’s the first time Republicans have crossed Trump on Iran.
In a second end-run around GOP leadership, 18 House Republicans broke ranks to pass the first major Ukraine aid package of Trump’s second term. Republicans Don Bacon and Brian Fitzpatrick even signed the discharge petition itself, putting their names on the maneuver that went around their own party’s leadership.
But what brightened my mood the most this week wasn’t Republican defections. It was Trump responding to a court order to strip his name from the Kennedy Center.
A federal judge ruled last week that Trump’s handpicked board broke the law when it renamed the institution after him, issuing the decision, fittingly, on John F. Kennedy’s birthday.
“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote. Now an internal memo has given staff until June 12 to strip his name from the signage, the letterhead, the email signatures, all of it. The man who put his name on a national monument to himself is watching it get pried back off, letter by letter.
None of this is a turning point on its own. But these are people who spent years afraid to cross him, and they’re starting to do it in public. Fear is the whole engine of this thing. When it slips, everything changes.
Why I’m Not Despairing
When people show up, things change. In Newark, demonstrators are still protesting conditions at the Delaney Hall detention facility. At least 63 protesters were arrested in a single week. In New York, a coalition called Hands Off NYC has trained more than 7,000 volunteers since January to peacefully resist ICE. That’s the exact activity Trump’s constant onslaught is designed to discourage.
Republicans passed ICE funding at five in the morning because people don’t actually want it. But this week, four Republicans defied him on Iran, a courthouse made him take his name off a building, and the dam started to crack.
So don’t look away. Refuse to be a bystander. We’ve been doing it since 2004, back when Raw Story chased the stories the big outlets wouldn’t touch. And as long as you’re with us, we’re not going anywhere.
Pour another cup. We’ve got a long summer ahead. And if you’re with us, become a paying subscriber today.
— John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
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