I'm going to put an explainer here on just HOW feckING BAD yesterday's move was. This is all going to get into some very dark literal nazi accounting type shit, so if you're triggered by humans being discussed like cattle you've been warned. Also I use ICE but include CBP for much of this too.
Here's what happens if ICE runs out of money before the first:
The federal government goes into 'skeleton crew mode'. This means they all but stop workplace raids, they stop investigations, and basically arrests just go down significantly because they have to reduce staff and they're responsible for custody, including state custodial laws. Federal contractors get promissory notes saying they'll be paid in the future and everyone treats those as good as cash because they don't want to kill a cherry 5 year contract just because the feds are a few months late.
So why is this happening? The office of budget management basically tries to help guide the executive along with a ton of other agencies in similar roles in how to spend money. It's a pretty simple equation, for every person you arrest and every family you separate, you need to have a place to put them and people to watch them, and thus you need a pipeline that's fairly consistent. Ironically the Nazis understood this which is why their records and lines were horrifyingly efficient (brought to you by IBM).
Trump however basically just routinely tells ICE and CBP to just arrest everyone and he's giving them insane quotas and leeway on the arrest side but because their staffing is static, this means he's fecked up and created a bottle neck. The bottle neck means they're constantly short staffed on the detention side and there's literally just not enough human bodies to staff the concentration camps. Whenever Trump finds them extra cash, he tosses it straight to capture.
So the Democrats created a message about the abhorrent conditions due to all these issues and they brought up toothpaste and soap. McConnell began devising a plan and had his people begin a call to action. Democrats did the same thing too. The democrats created a funding bill in which detainees/prisoners would be required to be fed every 48 hours at a bare minimum, they'd be required to be given soap and basic hygeine items to combat the rampant flu outbreak sending people to the ICU, and most importantly that ICE would freeze it's 'bed count' and not put a dime towards expanding the concentration camps and that they only hold people for 3 months. The bill doesn't even stop ICE, it just forces them to process people faster and give humane conditions for those being processed. It even paid for judges to do faster processing.
McConnell had his people send out the message that specifying how the cash gets spent was a poison pill and that the president needs 'flexibility'. The problem with that beyond all the moral issues of supporting ICE at all, is that from a logistical standpoint every dollar ICE has that is not bolted to the floor is going straight towards arrests, intelligence (to help arrest), and investigations. The Senate, including 30ish senate democrats who are morons, passed a clean bill that only ties 10m to something you can sue over (10m in medical consumable goods). Everything else is in totally vague categories like 'transportation' which legally could include expanding arrests capacity. These words are not defined in the bill.
The bill is 3 pages long, with the first pages delineating 2b dollars to the military. For comparison, the last appropriations bill I really absorbed involved food stamps and had 20 pages of stipulations and definitions to explain how the money gets apportioned. This bill basically has a page. It ALSO includes language to give the ability for the DHS secretary to change and redirect where the loosely described categories get spent WITHOUT congressional approval, they just need to submit a report about their changes to the appropriations committee but they do not require permission.
At the same time this blank check senate bill passes, the problem solvers caucus, who's only job is to literally refuse to ever allow any budget deadline to fail, organized enough democrats in the house to block revisions to the senate bill and to approve the senate version, not the initial house version. They told Pelosi this was non-negotiable and they wouldn't hold another vote, and that if Dems fought this they'd collectively tell the press that Democrats whine about soap but are unwilling to fund it. Pelosi caved after Pence promised to inform dems within a day that they killed someone rather than now where they just refuse to report it which they're required to do by federal law and better yet, and in a stunning 'what the feck' called a vote on something that was so bad a majority of her own party wouldn't vote for it. Oh also, Pence wasn't willing to put that promise in the actual bill. It's just a straight up hand shake promise. This was so egregious two dem house reps publicly denounced No Labels/problem solvers caucus and have left it.
So now what? More than likely Trump is going to just toss as much of this cash as he can into expanding ICE's arrests yet again, and we'll be back in a few months. Any kid that would have died without the bill will also die with the bill short of Trump having some kind of 'come to jesus' moment and focusing on caring for them.
The kicker is that we had a government shutdown for weeks over a 5.7b dollar wall bill and it happened WHILE Republicans owned the house, but the democrats when they have power voted for a 4.5b dollar blank check in less than 4 days.
The ultimate irony here is the Democrats were terrified of not passing this bill because in their minds, Republicans going to the press and saying "Look at these babies trump killed! It's the democrats fault for not helping trump!" would make them look bad and not the Republicans. I can't emphasize enough, this bill will not save a single kid and it will likely kill more than would be dead otherwise unless Trump magically stops deciding to continue doing what he's done the whole time but there's no indication of that.
Reading his posts reminds me of the monks from Monty Python's Holy Grail, the ones singing "Pie Iesu Domine, dona eis requiem' before smacking themselves in the face with a wooden board.