There is a reasonable argument for funding the agencies that enforce immigration law. There is a separate question about handing a single cabinet secretary $5 billion to spend at his personal discretion, with no specified purpose, and the answer to that question depends heavily on who the secretary is.
The House passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement bill Tuesday 214 to 212, along party lines. It funds ICE at $38 billion, Border Patrol at $26 billion, and creates a $5 billion pool controlled entirely by DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, described by Politico as funds he can “dole out at his discretion.” Mullin was confirmed in March after promising senators a softer tone on immigration and a commitment to working across the aisle. He has not exactly been delivering on the tone.
At his House appropriations hearing on June 3, Mullin got into a shouting match with a Democratic congressman who questioned his use of what the lawmaker called an $80 million luxury jet. The Republican chairman threatened to shut the hearing down. At a Senate appropriations hearing the same week, Mullin refused to commit to following federal court orders he considered politically motivated. The man who said his six-month goal was to stop leading the news cycle led it both weeks. For both wrong reasons.
The $5 billion pool is the actual story underneath the chaos. Congress’s power of the purse exists for a reason. Giving a cabinet secretary a billion-dollar discretionary fund, on top of $140 billion already allocated to immigration enforcement, and then passing it to a man who has publicly signaled that court orders are optional is not governance. It is an unsigned check made out to whoever is in that office. Right now that is Mullin. The signature on the check is Congress’s.
When the man in charge of $5 billion in unspecified funds has already said he reserves the right to ignore judges, what exactly is the oversight plan?
