The President of the United States, Donald Trump, achieved his biggest legislative victory of his second term this Friday with the approval in the Senate, after weeks of discussions, of the mega-financing package of 70 billion dollars (about 60 billion euros) that his questioned anti-migration agencies will receive, starting with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
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The measure has been approved with 52 senators voting in favor (only Senator Lisa Murkowski has spoken out against it within the Republican caucus) to 47 against, and it also does not include an annex that Democrats and some Republicans wanted to include in the final text against the so-called “Instrumentalization Fund,” a compensation system for those who, according to Trump, have been persecuted by past Democratic administrations and which has been described by its critics, Democrats and Republicans alike, directly as a scam.
Finally, and given that the procedure to establish this fund has been suspended by a court and the White House does not seem to intend to dispute this decision to calm things down, the Senate has ended up avoiding this point in its final approval of a text that now only needs the sure ratification of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the United States Congress.
Nevertheless, prominent Republican senators, such as Thom Tillis, have expressed their dissatisfaction with the prevailing division in the party when addressing the criticized fund. “If the Attorney General says this fund is no longer going to go forward, I don’t see why we couldn’t finish codifying it,” Tillis explained in statements to US media, “because it’s going to haunt each and every one of us until election day.”
In any case, Trump has won. With the approval of this allocation, ICE and the Border Patrol have their funds guaranteed for the next three years, regardless of any future crisis that paralyzes government funding.
Furthermore, it ends the blockade imposed by Democrats, who demanded drastic changes in the operating policies of these federal agencies, whose agents have been implicated in the shooting deaths of two Americans in Minnesota in early January, and have been subject to accusations of a spectrum of human rights abuses.
Awaiting Trump’s reaction, the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, has criticized the approval of a “rotten” bill that makes the Republican Party’s priorities “painfully clear”: “More money for Trump, more power for Trump, and for working families, nothing.”
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