As a Senator, Kamala Harris Tried to Take $220 Million Out of ICE’s Enforcement Division

Already-budgeted funds would mostly have been transferred to anti-border activist groups

By Jon Feere on July 29, 2024

In the middle of the Trump administration’s effort to ramp up deportations of criminal illegal aliens in 2019, then-Senator Kamala Harris introduced a bill that would have taken $220 million out of the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is responsible for arrests and deportations of illegal aliens. The goal of the bill (S.388 in the 116th Congress) was to frustrate ICE’s public safety mission and allow for criminal aliens to remain in the United States.

The funds had already been budgeted to ICE, but Harris’s bill would have transferred the main chunk of the funds ($180 million) out of the agency and into the hands of bureaucrats running the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “to provide the post-release legal, case management, and child advocate services” to unaccompanied illegal-alien children and their sponsors.

Funds to NGOs. Harris’s plan was to take ICE’s enforcement funds and have ORR grant them to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), specifically so that services for illegal aliens could be “provided by a social worker, employed by a nonprofit entity” for the purposes of “making referrals to area legal services”, “locating medical and therapeutic services”, providing “post-release case management…for the duration of their immigration proceedings”, and facilitating “efforts to connect every unaccompanied child…with legal representation for his or her immigration proceedings”. In other words, Harris’s plan was to take money Congress gave to ICE for enforcement purposes and funnel it to immigration attorneys and immigrant right groups, which undoubtedly would have benefited many virulent anti-border, anti-ICE activists.

Additionally, Harris’s bill would have created an advisory committee to “advise the Office of Refugee Resettlement on matters regarding shelters and placements for unaccompanied alien children relating to education, immigration law, physical and mental health, trauma-informed social work services, youth shelter management, and immigration detention reform.” The advisory committee would have been made up of people “employed by a nonprofit entities” who had a background in immigration law, cultural competency, and “immigration detention reform”, for example. Again, these are more anti-border, anti-ICE activists who would be authorized to “conduct unannounced inspections of all shelters” and consult with other groups including, specifically, the American Medical Association (which supports increases in cheap, foreign labor, DACA, and welfare benefits for illegal aliens) and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (which seeks to “phase out the use of immigration detention for immigration enforcement purposes.”).

Of the remaining $40 million, a total of $30 million would have been given to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Violent Crimes Against Children program to investigate criminal networks involved in child trafficking, and $10 million would have gone to the Administration for Children and Families to bolster the efforts of the Task Force to Prevent and End Human Trafficking. If these initiatives needed more taxpayer funding, Sen. Harris could have easily funded them directly. Taking funds out of ICE’s enforcement program was nothing more than an obvious anti-ICE, anti-border effort.

Harris bill also protected illegal alien sponsors. This same bill authored by Sen. Harris did much more than transfer ICE enforcement funds to anti-ICE activist groups. At the time she wrote this legislation, the Trump administration was running an important, public safety cooperative effort between ICE and HHS for the purpose of investigating potential sponsors of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) that appeared at our nation’s borders. Harris called it “outrageous” that ICE was arresting some of the criminal illegal aliens seeking to become sponsors of UACs and tried to put an end to the effort.