The IIC is made up of more than fifty national faith-based organizations working together in partnership to protect and promote the rights and dignity of our community members and neighbors. As Congress determines funding levels for the fiscal year 2020, we urge members of Congress to object to the ever-increasing funding poured into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for immigrant detention, deportation, and border militarization.
Faith communities have long stood against incarceration in favor of community-based alternatives to detention, mitigation of the root causes of forced migration, and meaningful reforms that would reunite families permanently and allow our communities to flourish. As evidenced by the cruel, inhumane, and objectionable treatment of our immigrant neighbors over the past few years, we stand strong in our belief that more money for enforcement only serves to exacerbate the plight of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants.
Immigrant Detention and Enforcement Expansion Beyond Congressional Will
Over the past few years, even amongst myriad reports of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress has consistently increased the funding allocation to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the DHS budget. Amid these congressionally-approved increases, DHS has also moved millions more dollars into the ICE detention account administratively – without congressional approval – and used other budgetary tricks to increase the detention budget. The detention and deportation budget has grown more than 40% since 2017, by around $1 billion. There are three main ways that DHS has overspent these accounts beyond what Congress intended:
- Transfer & reprogramming authority. Congress will often write into a bill a certain amount of leniency for when unforeseen circumstances arise and money needs to be reprogrammed from one account into another outside of the normal congressional appropriations process. This authority is intended to be a one-time occurrence and not a work-around for any agency to re-write and circumvent congressional appropriations or write their own appropriation. However, DHS consistently has abused this authority to reprogram money away from FEMA, Coast Guard, TSA, and the U.S. Air Marshals in order to expand immigrant detention against congressional will for multiple years now, including in FY16, FY17, FY18, and FY19.
- Anomalies to short-term spending bills or “continuing resolutions.” Continuing resolutions are supposed to be flat-line funding from what Congress approved the prior year. If there are any differences, that is done through a requested funding “anomaly” which can be an additional amount of money allocated beyond what was approved the prior year. ICE has often requested anomalies for the sole purpose of expanding the number of people in immigrant detention far beyond what was provided by Congress the prior year, intentionally circumventing the will of Congress. For example, for the continuing resolution for the beginning of the 2018 fiscal year, ICE requested a $1 billion anomaly for detention, which appropriators rejected.
- An exception apportionment from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Also under continuing resolutions, OMB decides how much money to allocate each agency over the period of the short-term spending bill based on the agencies’ full-year budgetary needs. For example, if Congress passes a three-month-long spending bill, an agency should typically get one-fourth of their overall spending for the year, split evenly over three months. However, ICE has increasingly gotten what is called an “exception apportionment” which means they will effectively get an advance loan from OMB. This means the agency gets more money upfront, under the assumption that they will spend less throughout the remainder of the year. Each time this has happened however, ICE expands the semi-permanent detention infrastructure and then uses that precedent to demand even more money from Congress when the spending bill expires.
Congress Must Cancel ICE & CBP’s Authority to Raid Other Agencies for Enforcement Money
In the drafting of the FY20 spending bills, we urge Congress to end the transfer and reprogramming authority for ICE detention and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) enforcement.
We also urge Congress to explicitly prohibit the expansion of the so-called Migrant “Protection” Protocols (MPP) which violate U.S. and international laws on asylum and our most basic moral call to care for one another. Congress must not conflate enforcement funding with programs that provide relief and support to communities. Accounts protecting refugees and asylum seekers are housed outside of the Department of Homeland Security. These accounts should be robustly funded with strong parameters to ensure that asylum seekers are treated as refugees and that immigrant and unaccompanied children are treated as children – not as detainees. The faith community requests $5,714,201,245 for the Refugee and Entrant Assistance (REA) account for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for critical integration services for refugees and asylees, Iraqi & Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients who served U.S. missions, human trafficking and torture survivors, among others – as well as the care, placement, and post-arrival services for unaccompanied children encountered in the United States or at the U.S. border.
Congress Must End DHS Overspending During Short-Term Spending Bills
ICE has also found ways to circumvent congressional authority on appropriations when operating under a short-term continuing resolution through anomalies and exception apportionments. ICE has used these two methods to then demand more money from Congress each time funding is up for renewal, a direct result of overspending what Congress initially allocated for detention. This year in particular, ICE has demonstrated a blatant disregard for the finite nature of government resources, and in so doing has undermined community safety. Even while ICE ran out of detention money, the administration issued a rule requiring the detention of children with their parents and conducted the largest worksite raid in at least a decade.
Should Congress need to pass a short-term continuing resolution for the beginning of FY20, we urge lawmakers to reject any anomaly request for increased detention or enforcement and explicitly prohibit an exception apportionment for ICE for the duration of that continuing resolution.
We urge Congress to seek every avenue to retain their “power of the purse” and end this history of fiscal mismanagement, including by ensuring ICE & CBP do not overspend under any continuing resolution and by cancelling ICE and CBP’s transfer and reprogramming authority in the FY20 DHS bill.
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