A Missouri Senator Just Won $350,000,000 for ICE. Then He Named the Stakes: Western Civilization.

On June 10, 2026, President Donald Trump (R) signed the Secure America Act — a roughly $70,000,000,000 package that funds Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of his term. Tucked inside it was a provision authored by Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO): $350,000,000 earmarked specifically to arrest criminal illegal aliens the moment sanctuary cities cut them loose.

The bill passed on raw party lines — 52–47 in the Senate, 214–212 in the House — with every Democrat voting no. Then Schmitt sat down with Fox News Digital and reframed the whole fight, not as a budget line, but as a civilizational test: a nation, he argued, has the basic right “to decide who can come and who has to go.”

This page lays out exactly what the $350,000,000 buys, what the broader $70,000,000,000package does, who voted which way, and the case Schmitt is making — with the sources for every figure.

• $350,000,000 — Schmitt-authored fund for ICE to arrest criminal aliens released from local custody in sanctuary jurisdictions · Source: Sen. Schmitt's office, Fox News
• $70,000,000,000 — total Secure America Act package funding ICE and Border Patrol through January 2029 · Source: CNBC, The Hill
• 52–47 — Senate vote, ~5 a.m. June 5 — zero Democratic support; lone GOP no was Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) · Source: CNBC, Fox News
• ~18,000 — criminal illegal aliens Schmitt says were released from custody in 2025 without deportation in sanctuary jurisdictions · Source: Fox News, Sen. Schmitt's office

Schmitt’s contribution to the package is narrow and pointed. According to his office, the provision gives ICE $350,000,000 for “detainer management, release monitoring, custodial transfer, transportation, arrests, and detention connected to criminal aliens released from local custody.” Translation: when a sanctuary city or state declines to honor an ICE detainer — refusing to hold a deportable criminal, give release notice, or arrange a safe jail-to-ICE handoff — this money funds the agents who go arrest that person on the street instead.

Schmitt has framed the line item as a direct answer to a public-safety record he calls one of the country’s worst. In the Fox interview he cited “18,000 such cases in 2025 alone” — criminal illegal aliens released without deportation — and named specific cases his office has tracked: four Venezuelan gang members who pleaded guilty to murdering two Americans, an illegal alien in California accused of killing a two-month-old baby, and a Colombian national sentenced to 25 years for raping a 12-year-old girl in Missouri.

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The headline-grabbing moment was not the dollar figure but the frame. Schmitt told Fox News Digital that the immigration debate had become a referendum on whether sovereign nations still get to be sovereign: “I think it’s a very important time for Western civilization, honestly, to stand up and say, ‘no, we actually believe in sovereignty. We believe that a country can decide who can come and who has to go.’” He accused the Democratic Party of a “suicidal empathy” on immigration that, left unchecked, will “destroy our country.”

Schmitt also rejected the idea that the opposition’s position is purely moral. “There’s an electoral play here. It’s about raw power,” he said, arguing that the policy is driven as much by political self-interest as by compassion. On the human cost of sanctuary releases he was blunt: “These violent rapists or other violent criminals are just being let loose — that’s how inverted the morality is on all this.”

“It's a very important time for Western civilization to stand up and say, 'no, we actually believe in sovereignty.'”

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) · Fox News Digital · June 2026

Schmitt’s provision rode inside a much larger vehicle. The Secure America Act directs roughly $70,000,000,000 to the Department of Homeland Security to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the next three years — through January 2029 — insulating both agencies from future shutdown fights. The Senate passed it 52–47 just before 5 a.m. on June 5, with no Democratic support; the lone Republican “no” was Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). The House cleared it 214–212 on June 9, and Trump signed it June 10.

Democrats had blocked the money for months, citing aggressive enforcement tactics, and they did not relent at the end. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), ranking member on House Appropriations, branded the package a “$70,000,000,000 slush fund for ICE and Border Patrol with no oversight.” Much of the floor fight, per CNN, was an intra-GOP brawl over a separate $1,800,000,000Justice Department “anti-weaponization” fund — a dispute Republicans ultimately resolved in favor of keeping the money in.

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Beyond Schmitt’s $350,000,000carve-out, the Secure America Act is the largest single infusion of immigration-enforcement cash in years. It funds detention capacity, agent hiring, transportation, and removal operations across ICE and CBP, and it locks that funding in through the rest of the term so the agencies cannot be defunded in a routine spending standoff. Schmitt’s framing of the broader effort has been consistent for months: “this is our effort to move forward with the promise that was made to the American people, that we meet mass migration in this country with mass deportations.”

The political backdrop is sharp. Democrats had withheld the funding after a confrontation earlier in the year in which federal officers shot and killed two protesters in Minneapolis, demanding changes to enforcement tactics as the price of any new money. Republicans refused, framed the standoff as Democrats “defunding ICE,” and pushed the package through on reconciliation rules that required no Democratic votes. The result is a bill that, by design, almost no one across the aisle supports — and that its authors regard as a feature, not a bug.

The reason Schmitt’s $350,000,000line exists at all is a specific failure point in the system: the detainer. When ICE wants to take custody of a deportable person already in a local jail, it lodges a detainer asking the jail to hold them briefly. Sanctuary jurisdictions frequently decline — releasing the person back onto the street rather than into federal custody. Schmitt’s money funds the labor-intensive alternative: tracking releases, monitoring, transportation, and re-arrest after the fact. It is, in effect, taxpayers paying twice because the first handoff was refused.

That is the heart of Schmitt’s “inverted morality” argument — that the policy machinery is built to release first and chase later. Critics counter that detainer-honoring without a judicial warrant raises Fourth Amendment questions and that aggressive street arrests sweep up non-criminal residents. Schmitt’s provision sidesteps that debate by simply funding the federal end of the chase rather than compelling local cooperation, which courts have repeatedly limited.

The facts are not in dispute: a $70,000,000,000 enforcement package is now law, it runs through January 2029, every Democrat voted against it, and a Missouri Republican’s $350,000,000provision specifically funds the re-arrest of criminals that sanctuary jurisdictions release. What is contested is the frame — whether this is, as Schmitt argues, a sovereign nation reasserting basic self-government, or, as Rep. DeLauro argues, an oversight-free “slush fund” for an enforcement apparatus Democrats wanted leashed.

What is clear is that the under-reported half of the story — the 18,000 releases, the named victims, the detainers refused — is the engine driving the new money. Schmitt named the stakes in the loftiest terms available: Western civilization. The narrower truth on the page is simpler. A sovereign country decided to pay for the arrests its own sanctuary cities had been declining to make. We will update this page as enforcement data from the new funding comes in.

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Last updated June 11, 2026