Immigration Provisions in New Omnibus Funding Bill

Early this morning, congressional leaders announced a new spending bill containing immigration provisions in line with what we’ve seen through the first year of Biden’s presidency. The bill, comprised of 2,741 pages, is expected to be voted on in the house within hours of its release.

Inside the massive $1.5 trillion omnibus package is a mix of several disastrous immigration provisions and a few attempts at creating the impression that the Biden Administration is serious about immigration enforcement and border security. DHS Secretary Mayorkas, with the full support of President Biden, has ignored laws requiring him to secure the border and enforce immigration law in the interior of the United States. This bill will provide money to DHS to fund efforts already underway to release hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens apprehended at the border into the U.S. interior.

Some of the provisions of the spending bill include:

• Allows DHS to Double the number of H-2B visas issued in FY2022.
• Reauthorizes the EB-5 investor visa, which allows foreign nationals to buy green cards, a program plagued by fraud since its creation in 1990.
• Rescinds a Trump-era program that set aside H-1B fees to provide job training to American workers.
• Offers taxpayer-funded lawyers for illegal aliens seeking U.S. residence under the Violence Against Women Act.

The bill preserves nearly $2 billion for border barrier construction, despite Biden’s hopes that the money would be reclaimed. Additionally, funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement would rise by 7% despite the President’s hopes to cut the department by more than $50 million.

The bill also includes a $240 million infusion of cash to ICE and a $1 billion infusion to Customs and Border Protection to help deal with the border surge caused by President Biden’s open-border policies.

While these investments appear like a move in the right direction, it would still be up to the President’s administration to appropriately use the money to deal with the meltdown of interior enforcement and border security and actually strengthen the nation’s immigration enforcement as a whole.

Democrat congressional negotiators have already announced that they prevented any of the funds set aside for immigration enforcement from being used to hire more enforcement personnel and that they did not raise the number of desperately needed ICE detention beds.

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To read the complete bill, please click here.