The House Reconciliation Bill Threatens Working Families and Our Democracy

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. 

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

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 $80 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 are regularly snatching students off the street in retaliation for protected speech. And now, 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.

The House reconciliation bill would reward this lawless behavior with $80 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 or legal services for immigrant children. 

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 charge families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border and fund border agents to conduct invasive physical searches of children as young as 12.  

3. The bill’s $69 billion for border wall construction will cost lives.

The House bill provides approximately $69 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 House 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 provides the Department of Defense $5 billion for the deployment of 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 4.5 million children who have a parent without a Social Security number but pay taxes with a tax identification number. These children are predominantly U.S. citizens who will be denied the same benefits as their peers because they have an immigrant parent.

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

The reconciliation bill includes a coercive policy that cuts 10% of Affordable Care Act Medicaid funds for the 34 states and D.C that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and elected to cover lawfully residing children or pregnant immigrants. This includes coverage of children and pregnant immigrants who normally have a five year waiting period under Medicaid, such as green card holders, certain survivors of serious crimes and domestic violence, and Special Immigrant Juveniles, as well as those who are never eligible, such as those seeking asylum, and those with Temporary Protected Status or deferred action.

14 of these states also 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.

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 Federal Student Aid, Medicare, SNAP and the Affordable Care Act 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:

• Affordable Care Act 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 that will result in nearly 14 million people losing health insurance.

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 all non-U.S. citizens, documented or not, to pay a 5% excise tax when sending money abroad. 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.