CHN Opposes Additional Funding for ICE

Letter to Congress

Editor’s notes: CHN sent this letter to every House of Representatives offices on March 3 opposing any additional funding – including another Continuing Resolution (CR) – for ICE and federal immigration enforcement actions until policymakers negotiate substantial reforms to end the harms hitting communities nationwide.

March 3, 2026

Dear Representative:

This week, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on Fiscal Year 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security. On behalf of the Coalition on Human Needs, we urge you to vote NO on this bill as long as it continues funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) without meaningful, enforceable reforms.

Families are being torn apart. Children are traumatized. Neighborhoods are destabilized by enforcement operations that have already cost lives. Congress must not continue to finance this harm under the guise of routine funding. Instead, we call on you to reject any bill that continues or expands funding for ICE and CBP until real reforms end the violence and abuse — not cosmetic or performative measures.

The Coalition on Human Needs brings together human service providers, faith communities, policy experts, civil rights and labor organizations, and others committed to meeting the needs of people with low incomes. Our members report how enforcement actions spread fear that keeps parents from taking children to school, families from seeking medical care, workers from reporting abuse, and survivors from asking for help. When communities live in fear, access to health care, housing, food, and economic security is undermined.

Congress has already provided tens of billions of dollars in additional enforcement funding, including roughly $75 billion for ICE through reconciliation legislation, expanding detention capacity and interior enforcement. These increases occurred alongside reductions in Medicaid and SNAP — programs that keep families healthy and children fed. Those were budgetary choices about priorities.

So far, accountability has not improved and harm has not subsided. Detention has grown deadlier. Enforcement operations have intensified. Oversight mechanisms that rely solely on reporting and after-the-fact review have proven insufficient to prevent abuse.

Public safety and constitutional accountability are not competing goals. Effective security requires lawful, transparent, and restrained enforcement. Expanding already-bloated enforcement budgets without enforceable guardrails, measurable standards, and meaningful limits does not strengthen national security — it weakens public trust.

The Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse precisely to prevent unchecked expansion of federal power. Appropriations are leverage. At a time of mounting fiscal pressures and competing domestic priorities, providing billions more to rogue agencies including ICE and CBP without demonstrable outcomes or enforceable reforms is fiscally irresponsible.

If this legislation does not reduce detention expansion, impose binding limits on harmful practices, protect sensitive locations, and ensure real accountability mechanisms before additional funds are authorized, it does not meet the moment.

We have joined with many expert organizations to outline the requirements for meaningful reform in the memorandum, “What Does Justice Look Like in a Renegotiated DHS Spending Bill?” That framework calls for enforceable measures to halt harmful practices, end racial profiling, prohibit enforcement at sensitive locations such as schools and health facilities, stop arrests without judicial warrants, end family detention, prevent expansion of 287(g) agreements, and ensure genuine accountability, including through full congressional investigation of the use of force by agents. These reforms must apply to all DHS funding streams, including the massive increases enacted last year.

Oversight without enforceable limits does not stop abuse. The question before Congress is simple: does this legislation materially reduce harm and impose binding guardrails? If it does not, it fails to meet this moment.

Rather than continuing to pour billions more into detention and enforcement, Congress should redirect excess resources toward health care, housing stability, nutrition assistance, education, and other investments that strengthen families and communities.

A vote for this FY26 DHS funding bill without enforceable limits is not neutral. It is a decision to expand authority without sufficient accountability.

We urge you to vote NO this week and insist on meaningful, binding reforms before any additional funding for ICE and CBP is authorized. This is a moment for constitutional responsibility, fiscal stewardship, and moral clarity.

Sincerely yours,

Deborah Weinstein

Executive Director