Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Barbara Sprint. I cover Congress. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And it has been another busy week in the world of politics and another week of President Trump pushing the boundaries of Republican support on Capitol Hill. So I want to start there, Barbara. The Senate,

overnight, early this morning, passed a funding package for immigration enforcement agencies.

Immigration is a clear priority for the Republican Party. And yet this was not a simple process. Can you

explain what happened? Yeah, it feels like Groundhog Day, right? It feels like we've been talking about

funding immigration enforcement agencies for a long time. And that's because we have.

Earlier this year, if we can cast back, Senate Democrats blocked funding the Department of Homeland

Security. And this was in the aftermath of federal agents shooting and killing two U.S.

citizens at protests in Minneapolis. And Senate

Democrats basically said we cannot fund the Department of Homeland Security in good faith unless we

see some of the sort of reforms and changes that we would like in terms of enforcement policy.

That never happened. And so what did end up happening was there was a shutdown, which I'm sure we all remember. Lots of concern over like, how are people going to fly with TSA, everything like that. And then Congress funded the department with a carve out for those immigration enforcement agencies. So like ICE, border patrol, Republicans decided to tackle that

in a separate bill using a budget process called reconciliation. And that is what passed early this

morning. It's a bill that would fund ICE and Border Patrol for another three years. So through the

duration of Trump's term. Well, it looked earlier this week that like Trump's big DOJ anti-weaponization

fund, this almost $2 billion fund was going to really hold up whether they were going to be

able to successfully pass this immigration funding bill, but that didn't end up really being the

roadblock that it seemed like it was going to be. What happened? Yeah, there was a lot of back and forth on that, wasn't there. I mean, the acting AG said that the fund would go away. Then the president was like, actually, I don't know that it will go away. I don't know that it's actually scrapped. And this is something that has been a concern among Democrats, certainly, but also among Senate Republicans. And the White House is aware of how Senate

Republicans feel about this. And still there was sort of this like murkiness over the fund.

Despite several Republican senators being vocal about their concerns about it, there were not

enough Republican votes last night, early this morning, to effectively kill the fund altogether. There were some proposed

amendments by both Republicans and Democrats that would have limited the anti-weaponization fund in

some way. And some of those amendments did receive, I would say, a notable number of Republican

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