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WASHINGTON — House Republicans will look to get nearly $70 billion for immigration enforcement over the finish line Tuesday, enough to fund a pair of Homeland Security agencies through the next three years and the rest of President Donald Trump’s time in office.

Speaker Mike Johnson will need near perfect attendance and unity on his side to complete weeks of action on the bill. The legislation got sidetracked when Republicans sought to include $1 billion for enhanced security on the White House grounds, including for Trump’s new ballroom, and the Trump administration tried to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate allies of the president who claim they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted. Those proposals proved politically toxic and were scrapped.

Now, the bill is focused entirely on immigration enforcement, a topic that Republicans have treated as a defining issue between the two major political parties and one they hope will carry them to victory in this year’s midterm elections. The bill provides $38 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $26 billion for the Border Patrol and another $5 billion to cover unforeseen costs, fueling Trump’s deportation agenda.

“It’s long overdue,” said Johnson, R-La., of the bill. “We have to fund border security and immigration enforcement, and it’s sad that Republicans have to do it on our own.”

Funding accelerates Trump’s deportation agenda

The funding comes on top of the nearly $140 billion that the Republican-controlled Congress gave ICE and Customs and Border Protection last year as part of Trump’s tax and spending cuts bill.

Democrats objected to giving the agencies more money without significant changes in the way they operate after the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. For example, Democrats insisted that agents be required to display their ID badges during enforcement operations and that they get a judicial warrant before entering private property. Instead, the funding will come with virtually no strings attached.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed his party would oppose the package.

“We believe that taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people – not give ICE another $70 billion blank check so that they can unleash brutality on American citizens and violently target law-abiding immigrant communities,” said Jeffries of New York.

Homeland Security faced longest shutdown in history

The package is the result of a monthslong standoff in Congress after Democrats refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis and other American cities, leading to the longest shutdown in agency history.

Negotiations had been underway with the White House to alter ICE operations as Democrats were demanding. When those negotiations failed, Republicans turned to a complicated procedural maneuver to get around the filibuster and pass the immigration funding with no Democratic votes.

If approved, the package would next go to Trump for his signature, all but assuring an essentially uninterrupted flow of funds for his immigration enforcement and deportation agenda into 2029.

The Senate completed its work on the legislation last week during an all-night session that extended into the early morning hours Friday. The final 52-47 vote on the bill was nearly party line, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska the only Republican to oppose it.

Money comes at pivotal time for immigration agenda

The money will come at a pivotal time for the Department of Homeland Security, which is under new leadership after Trump replaced Kristi Noem with new Secretary Markwayne Mullin in March.

While Mullin has vowed to keep the department out of the headlines, the administration is under pressure from anti-immigration advocates to deliver on Trump’s campaign promise of the largest deportation operation in American history.

So far, the administration has not hit its goal of 1 million deportations a year, but Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has promised more to come, including hinting at immigration enforcement actions in New York, the nation’s biggest city, which is heavily Democratic.

At the same time, the administration is making it more difficult for legal immigrants to remain in the U.S. by working to end Temporary Protective Status, changing the processes for obtaining green cards and leaving some Dreamers — the young people who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children — reporting delays in renewing their status, which allows them to stay and work.

Tight vote ahead

On the House side, Johnson has little margin for error. Republicans can afford to lose only a couple of votes if every lawmaker is present. GOP leadership opted to avoid any hiccups and sent lawmakers home last week rather than take up the bill early Friday once the Senate had completed its all-nighter.

The bill is just a slim package, without the hundreds of pages of details and directives that typically come from Congress when it provides funding for agencies.

Leading up to the vote, Democrats portrayed DHS as an agency that has used its new resources to buy private jets for its leadership, warehouse immigrants in deplorable conditions and attack U.S. citizens.

“To give these rogue agencies another $70 billion now when they still have $100 billion in the bank from last year would implicate all of us in the escalating corruption and shameful actions of this department,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democratic member on the House Judiciary Committee.

Republicans countered that they were fulfilling their duty to safeguard the nation and support the men and women charged with enforcing the law.

“Democrats can say whatever they want, but what it’s about is public safety. What’s it about is keeping Americans safe,” said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minn.

Freking and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.

What exactly is President Bush trying to achieve on civil rights?

Against the backdrop of the racial controversy that cost Trent Lott (R-Miss.) his job as Senate majority leader, Bush’s own intentions have come under closer scrutiny. But the president has sent such mixed signals that some critics believe he’s playing a double game — moderate on decisions that can be traced directly to him and much more conservative on judicial appointments that will profoundly affect the reach of civil rights law, but only gradually and far away from the White House.

Bush drew praise even from his staunchest critics in the traditional civil rights community for his strong condemnation of Lott’s wink toward segregation. Indeed, while the White House always said publicly that Bush didn’t want Lott to resign, the president’s sharp rebuke during a speech in Philadelphia probably did more to doom the Mississippi senator than anything else that happened since Lott’s remarks at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party Dec. 5.

But since Bush’s speech, the liberal civil rights community has repeatedly insisted that the president’s stirring words in defense of equal opportunity needed to be measured against his actions. Just minutes before Lott stepped down Friday, a coalition of civil rights groups held a news conference in Washington to pound at that message.

Conservatives rightly argue that support for the agenda of the liberal civil rights community isn’t the only measure of commitment to equal opportunity. But it’s reasonable for the civil rights groups to insist that a president’s actions should always be weighed more heavily than his words.

So far, Bush has moved cautiously on the civil rights issues most directly under his control. He has appointed conservatives to most key civil rights positions, and liberals charge that the administration isn’t enforcing the laws as aggressively as Bill Clinton did when he was president.

But Bush’s record hasn’t generated the intense conflict that characterized the liberal response to the enforcement of the civil rights laws under Ronald Reagan, and even Bush’s father. William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a leading liberal group, says that Bush’s record shows “a policy that is largely inert, not moving forward, and in a few areas is regressing.” Considering the source, that’s mild criticism.

Nor has Bush moved to retrench the key federal programs that promote affirmative action — policies meant to expand opportunities for minorities in hiring and government contracting. For years, conservative thinkers have viewed these programs as unfair to whites and counterproductive — a group entitlement that exacerbates social divisions.

But Bush has made no effort to repeal the executive order requiring federal contractors to establish goals and timetables for hiring women and minorities. Conservatives have long accused that program, which affects fully one-fifth of all workers in America, of encouraging quotas. Nor has the administration retrenched the programs providing minorities preferences in federal contracting. In all, Bush has done little to disturb the “mend it, don’t end it” balance on federal affirmative action programs that Clinton established in 1995.

Likewise, even before Lott, the administration was hesitant about joining a lawsuit opposing racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan now heading toward the Supreme Court. After Lott, officials say, it’s even less likely that Bush will use the suit to argue for a sweeping rollback of affirmative action.

Bush has had such a hands-off policy on these issues that conservatives are starting to grumble. “Conservatives are going to be very disappointed if two years from now there hasn’t been any positive movement,” says Roger Clegg, general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group.

Clegg probably shouldn’t hold his breath. While Bush has always declared himself against quotas and preferences, he’s never shown any enthusiasm for direct combat on this front. His calculation seems to be that conflict over affirmative action would eclipse efforts to reach minority voters on other issues, such as education and homeownership. “Once you enter this thing,” one Bush political advisor says, “it’s hard to move the ball on anything else.”

But liberal groups take little comfort in Bush’s cautious approach to direct action. Their fear is that Bush is filling the federal courts with conservative judges who will reshape the civil rights laws in ways he wouldn’t risk through executive or legislative initiatives that carry his fingerprints.

It’s not an unreasonable fear. Many of Bush’s judicial nominees have records on civil rights much more conservative than the views Bush has expressed. Civil rights groups argue that Bush appellate court nominees such as Carolyn Kuhl, Jeffrey Sutton and Charles W. Pickering Sr. have displayed a determination to narrow the way civil rights laws are enforced.

All of these nominations will generate fireworks in the new year (especially if Bush fulfills his promise to renominate Pickering, whom the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee rejected last year largely around accusations of racial insensitivity). But this conflict will really come to a head if Bush receives an opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice.

“That’s the big one,” insists Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. “If they get a firm [conservative] Supreme Court majority, it will render the progressive agenda moot for decades. This is the whole ballgame for them. That’s why they are willing to make compromises legislatively or in the executive branch.”

Bush is under no obligation to support Neas’ agenda on civil rights. But voters have a right to demand accountability from elected officials. If Bush wants to roll back affirmative action, it’s hard to explain his executive actions; if he doesn’t, it’s hard to explain his court nominations.

Bush is sending dissonant signals, perhaps intentionally. But in the end, it’s his decisions on the courts that will speak loudest. Words matter, but words fade. When he condemns Lott, Bush is writing in sand. When he picks judges, he is carving in granite.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.