WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- President Donald Trump signed legislation June 10 providing $70 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol.
Prior to the bill's passage, the U.S. bishops were among those who urged lawmakers to make immigration policy reforms aimed at protecting the dignity of migrants, such as efforts to prevent the separation of families.
However, after months of debate over possible reforms, none of those measures were ultimately included in the final bill as negotiations in Congress fell apart.
Called the Secure America Act, the approximately $70 billion legislation would fund ICE and CBP for the next three years, through the end of Trump's second term in the White House, and was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in a narrow 214-212 vote the previous day.
The bill's Senate passage earlier in June came after Trump's attempt to attach a controversial $1.8 billion "weaponization fund" stalled it the previous month. Senators on both sides of the aisle raised strong objections to that attempt and it was scrapped.
In a June 9 statement, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., argued, "Here's the end result of Democrats' record-setting obstruction: CBP and ICE will now be funded for the remainder of President Trump's term and Democrats will have no ability to defund these agencies in the 119th or 120th Congresses."
In June 9 comments on the House floor, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., argued the bill was "a blank check to ICE without any guardrails, any oversight or any accountability."
"Immigration enforcement in this country should be fair, it should be just and it should be humane," he said.
Catholic immigration advocates beyond the bishops had also sought reforms to immigration enforcement during debate over the bill, and some raised concerns about the party-line measure that ultimately passed.
Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy and communications at the Center for Migration Studies of New York and the former director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told OSV News, "DHS now has an almost unlimited amount of funding to build a mass deportation infrastructure with no guardrails or accountability."
"We will continue to see families separated, pregnant women and children detained, and due process rights violated," Appleby said. "Immigrants, including those with legal status, will be afraid to attend Mass, violating their right to practice their faith."
Appleby urged the bishops and the faithful to "stand up even more forcefully for the rights of immigrants during this dark period."
Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a group that works to apply the perspective of Catholic social teaching in policy and practice to the U.S.-Mexico border region, told OSV News, "This year's months-long dispute over Congress's additional funding for immigration enforcement reflected a rare, bipartisan alarm after the deaths of U.S. citizens during ICE and Border Patrol operations in Minnesota and a broader string of reported abuses, constitutional concerns, and an alarmingly high number of deaths in immigrant detention over the past year."
"People across the political spectrum urged sensible limits and accountability for agencies with sweeping powers," he continued. "Yet, following a historic infusion of resources in 2025, Congress and the Trump administration are poised to authorize still more enforcement capacity without commensurate oversight.
"We are failing to address the deeper policy failures at the heart of our immigration system while worsening legal erosion, community strife and the real human harms -- sometimes fatal -- that oversight is meant to prevent," he added.
In a June 1 letter, Bishop Brendan J. Cahill of Victoria, Texas, chairman of the USCCB's Committee on Migration, wrote to the top senators on the Committee on Appropriations that he hoped they would consider key policy reforms aimed at protecting the dignity of migrants, such as efforts to prevent the separation of families.
"Whatever disagreements may arise on specific policy questions, migration is fundamentally about the movement of human persons, each of whom is created in the image and likeness of God," he wrote. "In the course of contemporary debate, this reality is frequently overlooked or dismissed entirely, paving the way for dehumanizing rhetoric and policy responses that fail to advance the common good."
