Proposed appropriations bill would practically double the size of the Border Patrol

The House is set to vote on Friday on a $1.2 trillion spending package just ahead of a deadline for a partial government shutdown. It includes funding for the departments of defense, state, labor, and health and human services. And for the Department of Homeland Security, it also includes a significant bump in funding for border security.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Congress failed to pass a bipartisan immigration and border security bill, so the almost $62 billion in discretionary spending for DHS now kind of looks like a border security bill lite.

“This is one of the most astounding immigration enforcement increases that we’ve seen,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “You’re talking about almost a 35% increase in the Border Patrol budget.”

Part of that is almost half a billion dollars to more or less double the size of the force by hiring 22,000 more Border Patrol agents.

“I’m skeptical of their ability to do that,” Bier said. “We’ve seen Border Patrol try to recruit and be unable to do so. But this is certainly a huge amount of money.”

The funding package also includes more than $100 million for border security technology.

There is also “some funding to fight the asylum backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,” noted Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank focused on “immigration and integration policies in North America and Europe.”

While there’s lots of cash for border and immigration enforcement, “we also in the prior funding bill saw that there was a decrease in the funding for immigration courts,” she said. That’s the opposite of what’s needed to process that backlog.

Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy non-profit, said that the focus on enforcement at the Southern Border ignores other pressing immigration concerns.

“It actually doesn’t give quite enough resources to the other cities around the country that are also dealing with migrants and newcomers,” she said.

Without more comprehensive immigration reform, annual appropriations bills seem to be the only path for movement.

But “this isn’t the best way to solve the issue,” Murray said. “It might be a Band-Aid for a short term, but likely this will also, you know, soon proved not to be a solution.”

Because you can’t enforce your way out of a border crisis, Murray added.