This explainer series, Catholic Doctrine on Immigration, explores how the teaching of faith and Scriptures intersect with immigration policy, focusing on the role of Milwaukee’s Catholic Church in responding to enforcement, labor dynamics, and family separation. Through detailed reporting across legal, economic, and pastoral contexts by Milwaukee Independent staff members, the series examines how Church teaching shapes institutional action and informs the Church’s engagement on national immigration issues. mkeind.com/catholicimmigration
By early 2024, the United States appeared on the brink of a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration. After months of negotiations, a sweeping Senate package promised to modernize border enforcement, curtail asylum backlogs, and expand funding for technology designed to intercept synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
The proposal, backed by Republicans and Democrats alike, was framed as the most significant immigration deal in a decade, and perhaps the last realistic chance for Congress to take action before the November election.
But the legislation collapsed in spectacular fashion. Though not serving as president at the time, Donald Trump played a decisive role in ensuring the bill’s defeat. By applying public and private pressure on congressional Republicans, particularly House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump helped torpedo a measure that included many policies his own administration had once championed.
The fallout from that obstruction is still unfolding today. Fentanyl detection systems purchased by the Department of Homeland Security sat in storage facilities for months, lacking the installation funds included in the original bill. Border processing remained overwhelmed. And key provisions that could have stabilized immigration enforcement were swept aside. All while Trump used the crisis as a rhetorical weapon during his re-election campaign.
At the heart of the legislation was a $118 billion emergency spending package. The bill tied domestic border enforcement to foreign aid, combining assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan with a substantial overhaul of immigration policy. That included stricter asylum procedures, automatic shutdown mechanisms for high-volume crossings, and over $400 million in funding for border technology, including scanners to detect fentanyl hidden in vehicles at legal ports of entry.
The scanner systems, known as non-intrusive inspection (NII) devices, were purchased by U.S. Customs and Border Protection but never installed due to a lack of appropriated funds. The Senate bill would have remedied that, authorizing DHS to deploy dozens of scanners at land crossings where fentanyl is often smuggled by U.S. citizens in personal vehicles.
Critically, the bill also proposed reducing pressure on Border Patrol by allowing asylum officers, rather than backlogged immigration courts, to conduct screenings — a policy that many Republicans had demanded in previous sessions.
Despite this alignment with long-standing conservative goals, Trump denounced the bill as a political “gift” to President Biden and made its destruction a centerpiece of his campaign narrative.
Trump publicly warned Republicans not to hand Biden any legislative victory on immigration, and his influence within the party’s base made defiance a political risk. Within days, Johnson declared the bill “dead on arrival,” and Senate Republicans quickly withdrew their support.
The defeat went beyond being rhetorical. Trump’s intervention effectively blocked funding for immediate security improvements, including the installation of fentanyl scanners.
This delay continued into the early months of 2025, by which point opioid-related deaths in the United States had risen to record highs. Law enforcement officials in border states repeatedly cited the absence of scanner technology as a barrier to effective interdiction.
While the scanners were eventually funded through separate appropriations in March 2024, the delay had measurable consequences. Several devices sat idle for nearly a year while fentanyl seizures at ports of entry surged. Congressional oversight reports from mid-2025 indicate that, even now, fewer than half of the planned scanner installations have been completed.
But the more lasting consequence of Trump’s interference may lie in what replaced the bipartisan approach.
Once back in office in January 2025, Trump abandoned legislative reform in favor of executive action. In the first 100 days of his second term, his autocratic regime issued a flurry of directives that violated the U.S. Constitution, including ones designed to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations without oversight, revive mass deportation protocols, and pursue new agreements with state and local law enforcement to deputize them as immigration agents.
ICE, which had seen its budget plateau under previous administrations, is now on track to receive a record $165.3 billion under Trump’s proposed 2026 budget. The funding surge has enabled the reactivation of controversial interior enforcement programs, including workplace raids, courthouse detentions, and multi-agency sweeps in sanctuary cities.
Civil liberties groups and immigration attorneys have warned that these expansions risk turning ICE into a political enforcement tool. Trump’s regime has justified its brutal crackdown as a response to fentanyl trafficking and border “chaos.” But data from DHS itself indicates that most fentanyl seizures occur at legal checkpoints, and that the vast majority of smugglers are U.S. citizens, not undocumented migrants.
The return of these autocratic tactics has sparked comparisons to past regimes where enforcement powers were used to control populations through fear and surveillance. While such comparisons are inflammatory, the structural transformation of ICE into a rapid-response domestic force has drawn bipartisan concern in recent years. Under Trump’s renewed leadership, the agency’s authority now appears broader and unaccountable than ever.
The result is a bifurcated legacy. Trump obstructed a functioning path toward bipartisan enforcement, then returned to office and replaced it with a model of executive policing. What might have been a structured and transparent upgrade to immigration enforcement has instead become an opaque expansion of power under singular political control.
At the policy level, the Biden-era border package was designed to create automatic triggers based on border crossing data. When average daily encounters exceeded thresholds of 5,000 individuals over seven consecutive days, DHS would be required to initiate emergency shutoff mechanisms, restricting new entries and detaining crossers pending review. Under Trump, no such thresholds exist — only broad discretionary authority, concentrated in the White House and enforced through ICE.
The current regime also lacks the transparency and accountability mechanisms embedded in the failed 2024 bill. While that legislation would have included expanded oversight from the Department of Justice, including data reporting and compliance audits, Trump’s enforcement expansion operates almost entirely through executive directives.
Internal ICE memos obtained by several news outlets in June 2025 indicate that agents have been granted wide latitude to initiate operations based on “community-level intelligence,” a vague term with no statutory definition.
Immigrant communities in major urban centers have reported a sharp increase in unannounced raids since March, particularly in cities like Chicago, Houston, L.A., and Atlanta. Advocacy organizations have recorded multiple cases of undocumented individuals detained without warrants and denied access to legal counsel for prolonged periods, conditions that run counter to long-standing procedural standards.
Meanwhile, public framing around fentanyl continues to distort the source and flow of the drug. Despite repeated claims by officials within the Trump regime that border laxity fuels the opioid crisis, government seizure data has consistently shown that the vast majority of fentanyl enters the United States through legal ports of entry, concealed in commercial shipments or private vehicles.
U.S. citizens, not undocumented migrants, constitute the bulk of those arrested for trafficking the drug across the southern border.
This disconnect between rhetoric and reality has enabled the regime to conflate immigration enforcement with drug interdiction in the public imagination, thereby justifying the aggressive expansion of ICE authorities.
In effect, the political sabotage of a real, enforceable border solution in 2024 set the stage for its replacement by a reactive, punitive, and increasingly unaccountable federal agency.
For immigration attorneys and civil rights groups, the current situation carries echoes of earlier post-9/11 policies that blurred the line between national security and civil policing. But unlike those temporary measures, the infrastructure now being built under Trump’s second term is designed for permanence.
New ICE regional task forces have been authorized to coordinate with state-level intelligence agencies and local police departments, creating overlapping jurisdictions that dilute legal oversight and increase the risk of abuse.
Critics within DHS have voiced concerns that the administration is building what amounts to a dual-track system of immigration enforcement: one for the courts, and another for the streets. The former requires due process. The latter does not.
From interviews with several officials, the consensus is clear: the failed 2024 bill would have established a unified system with enforceable standards. Its defeat fractured that process, empowering an improvisational model that responds not to policy objectives but to political opportunity.
Trump’s rejection of that bipartisan compromise was not merely a political tactic. It was a strategic dismantling of a viable enforcement framework. That vacuum has now been filled by executive fiat, targeting immigrants not as a population to manage through law, but as a constituency to vilify for electoral gain.
With Trump once again in control of the federal immigration apparatus, the consequences of that 2024 sabotage are being fully realized. The fentanyl scanners are finally being installed, but too late to prevent months of unchecked smuggling.
But the bigger story is not about equipment. It is about Trump’s extrajudicial authority.
The defeated border bill was an opportunity to build a lasting legal framework. Trump chose instead to destroy it and then claim the wreckage as evidence of his own necessity.
