9 Things to Know About the Reconciliation Bill

Congressional Republicans are working to pass a bill that would remove some of the few remaining limits on the Trump administration’s hateful vision for America. By calling this a budget bill, Republican leaders seek passage using a process called “reconciliation.” Reconciliation requires a mere majority in both the House and the Senate for passage, not the usual 60 votes needed in the Senate. This bill has passed the House and we now have reviewed what the Senate is proposing.

The reconciliation bill presents a generational threat to democratic rule of law and community wellness across the country. It is a messy compilation of cruel policy provisions that attack working class families while lavishing unthinkable sums of money on immigration enforcement and corporations.

Members of Congress considering their vote on this bill must take a hard look at the Trump administration’s deployment of the National Guard and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles. They must consider what it would mean to supercharge behaviors like masked ICE agents violently arresting people who show up for court hearings. This administration is using immigration enforcement as a means to consolidate power on the road to authoritarianism. A yes vote on this bill is rubber stamping tyranny – a blank check for lawlessness.

The National Immigration Law Center urges Members of Congress to loudly oppose this bill. Here are nine reasons why.

1. The bill hands the Trump administration more than $100 billion to further erode due process and democratic norms.

The Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement threatens our democracy. In its first months in office, the administration unleashed wartime powers to send nearly 300 people to a Salvadoran prison notorious for torture – most without a hearing. Immigration agents snatched students off the street in retaliation for protected speech. The White House’s policy chief and the Homeland Security Secretary are openly entertaining the idea of suspending habeas corpus – the most basic right to challenge one’s detention in a court of law. And the National Guard and Marines are on the streets of Los Angeles, part of the administration’s violent response to largely peaceful protests in solidarity with communities ripped apart by raids.

The reconciliation bill would reward this lawless behavior with approximately $100 billion toward the construction of immigration jails, hiring of immigration agents, and unrestricted funds for more arrests and deportations. Worse, the bill would make it easier for the administration to commit abuses by precluding the use of any of the funds for legal access programming and expanding processes for fast track deportations without due process.

2. The bill viciously targets immigrant kids.

Although billed as a budget proposal, the House reconciliation bill explicitly attempts to change immigration law, including blatant attacks on immigrant families and children. The bill includes $45 billion to build immigration jails for families and adults – more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget – and would allow indefinite detention of immigrant children. Detention at this scale and duration will mean horrific conditions and frequent deaths; we know this because of how quickly conditions are deteriorating at the administration’s current rate of expansion. The bill would also fund border agents to conduct invasive physical searches of children as young as 12.

3. The bill’s $50+ billion for border militarization will cost lives.

The bill provides upwards of $50 billion for border militarization measures that history has already shown to be ineffective, wasteful, and deadly. Border walls and barriers are hateful symbols that have proven ineffective at deterring people fleeing violence. The only inevitable result of more border wall construction is more deaths as people are forced to attempt more dangerous routes to cross the border. Our southern border is already a morgue – 181 Mexican nationals alone have died during the first four months of 2025, double the number of deaths from the same period in 2024.

4. The bill imposes exorbitant penalties for seeking humanitarian protections or navigating the immigration court system.

The bill includes a new schedule of exorbitant, un-waivable fees attached to nearly all applications and forms necessary to seek humanitarian protection or navigate the immigration adjudication system. A person seeking asylum in the United States will have to pay an “application fee” of at least $1,000 and at least another $550 every six months to get work authorization. Imagine fleeing for your life, arriving at a new country with your young children, and being forced to choose between paying your child’s medical bills or for your asylum application.

5. The bill diverts military resources toward lawless immigration enforcement.

In addition to the extraordinary sums provided to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement and detention, the reconciliation bill takes us further down the dangerous path of utilizing the military for civil enforcement. It provides between $3.3 billion (the Senate version) and $5 billion (the House version) to the Department of Defense to use military personnel for immigration enforcement and the temporary detention of immigrants on Department of Defense installations. The military has no place enforcing civil immigration law. 

6. The bill excludes millions of children from the Child Tax Credit.

The Child Tax Credit is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs in history. This reconciliation bill not only makes permanent a policy that excludes 1 million children without Social Security numbers from the Child Tax Credit, it further excludes over 2.2 million  children who do not have a parent with a Social Security number. These children are predominantly U.S. citizens who will be denied the same benefits as their peers because they have immigrant parents.

7. The bill enacts punishing Medicaid cuts for states that provide health care for immigrants.

The reconciliation bill cuts Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion funds for states that use their own budgets to cover health care for:

• any undocumented immigrants or 
• other adults that aren’t qualified for Medicaid due to their immigration status.

This includes states that use their own dollars to provide health care to people seeking asylum, and people with Temporary Protected Status or deferred action, including DACA recipients. It does not include states that have opted, under federal law, to only cover health care for lawfully present children and pregnant immigrants.

Fourteen states use their own budgets to cover undocumented immigrants, primarily children. This policy would cut, for example, $27 billion in Medicaid funding for California, $15 billion for New York, and $5 billion for Illinois. Undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for federal Medicaid, meaning these cuts will not only impact immigrant communities but all state residents. The goal is clear: this is a new precedent for federal overreach designed to force states to abandon their policies of inclusive medical care for all.

The Senate version of the bill adds additional Medicaid cuts for all states, which are required to cover the cost of emergency care for immigrants that are not eligible for Medicaid due to their immigration status. States will have to pay more to reimburse hospitals providing medical care to certain immigrants. This change primarily serves as a cost shift from the federal government to budget-strapped states and could lead to financial problems for hospitals that treat many immigrants.

These cuts are on top of the bill’s many other Medicaid cuts, such as the creation of bureaucratic work requirements and requiring some low-income recipients to pay fees towards their health care. The bill also adds new red tape for Medicaid applicants, denying them “reasonable opportunity periods” to receive coverage while verifying their citizenship or eligible immigration status.

8. The bill restricts Medicaid, CHIP, Federal Student Aid, Medicare, SNAP and the ACA for lawfully present immigrants.

Under current law, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal public benefits, but some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for a few key federal programs. Cruelly, the reconciliation bill attacks even these few opportunities for support, kicking lawfully residing, taxpaying immigrants off several public programs if they do not yet have a green card, including:

• Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
• ACA health coverage subsidies
• The Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP)
• Medicare, which already requires 10 years of work for most people’s eligibility
• Federal Student Aid under the Higher Education Act

Lawfully present immigrants targeted for exclusions by the bill include refugees, asylum applicants and recipients, parole recipients, trafficking and domestic violence victims, people granted temporary protected status, and more people who have faced war and trauma in coming to the United States. These provisions will result in many immigrants who have already endured tremendous hardships going without health care. 

These cuts are on top of the bill’s tens of billions of dollars in SNAP cuts for all states and changes to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act access. They will result in nearly 14 million people losing health insurance according to analysis of the House bill, which did not include the Medicaid and CHIP restrictions.

9. The bill uses the tax system to attack immigrants.

The United States’ tax system should be, on principle, one of fairness. Millions of immigrants pay taxes, providing hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for state and federal programs. Any person who pays taxes should be able to utilize the same credits, deductions, and exclusions as everyone else. But this bill creates a two tiered tax system, locking out people without Social Security numbers from the new deductions for tips and overtime and from tax credits like the American Opportunity and Lifetime Learning Credits.

The bill goes further by punishing immigrants who make the very personal choice to send money home to their overseas families, known as remittances. It requires people to pay a 3.5% excise tax when sending money abroad. Those who file taxes using a Social Security number can claim a credit for this tax, creating a convoluted system of reporting requirements that will burden and confuse many. This tax needlessly punishes immigrants in the U.S. by depriving their families and children of critical economic support, particularly when they are facing ever increasing natural disasters around the world.

This bill cuts safety net programs for those who need it in order to pay for lawless immigration enforcement and tax cuts for corporations and billionaires. It threatens our communities’ access to wellness and healthcare and will undermine our democracy. We urge Members of Congress to vehemently oppose.