The House on Tuesday narrowly passed Republicans’ $70 billion immigration enforcement bill, as the G.O.P. banded together to steer around unified Democratic opposition and send President Trump legislation to fund his deportation crackdown through the end of his term.
The vote was 214 to 212 along party lines, with every Democrat opposed. The action capped a tempestuous and dysfunctional journey to push through the multiyear bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Republicans did so using a maneuver that was never supposed to be employed for routine spending, after Democrats refused to fund the agencies unless changes were made following the fatal shooting of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.
Its passage was a major victory for Republican leaders in Congress, who had toiled for weeks to unite their conference around legislation that Mr. Trump had demanded they pass, and that G.OP. lawmakers were eager to advance ahead of midterm elections in which they are fighting to keep control of the House and Senate.
“We were sent here by the American people who gave President Trump an overwhelming victory,” said Representative Jodey C. Arrington, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Budget Committee. “Every swing state, the popular vote, the electoral vote, gave us unified Republican leadership in Congress. The No. 1 reason they did that was to restore the rule of law and to put the American people’s safety and security first. And that’s exactly what we’re doing today.”
But what began as a measure that unified Republicans eager to support Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration stance devolved in recent weeks into a political albatross for the party, putting election-year divisions on display.
G.O.P. lawmakers balked at the president’s demands to include $1 billion in security funds for his ballroom project, and they refused to move ahead with the measure without assurances that no federal money would be used to create a $1.8 billion fund his administration announced to pay people who claim they were victimized by the government.
While the administration said it would not move forward with such a fund, several Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to attach a prohibition or limitations to the bill. But those efforts failed, leaving the measure silent on the matter.
Still, Senate Republican leaders were able to put down the revolt in their ranks and pass the measure early Friday.
And Mr. Johnson quelled a short-lived rebellion of his own on Tuesday, after a clutch of conservative Republicans briefly withheld the votes needed to allow the measure to clear a key procedural hurdle, demanding a vote on a separate sweeping border security bill to crack down on unlawful immigration. They eventually backed down and allowed the measure to move ahead.
Democrats were unanimous in their opposition to the bill, saying they would not lend their votes to fund immigration enforcement tactics they characterized as wildly out of control.
“Donald Trump promised America that he would target violent felons who are here illegally,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said. “But instead, taxpayer dollars are being used by ICE and his violent mass deportation machine to target and brutalize American citizens — in some cases, killing them.”
Republicans pushed the $70 billion legislation through Congress using a process known as reconciliation, created to allow the majority party to dodge a filibuster and pass bills aimed at tackling federal deficits on a simple majority vote. In doing so, they effectively gave up on the normal, bipartisan appropriations process that has always been used to fund major government agencies.
The circuitous dispute over funding for immigration enforcement began in February, when federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed the two American citizens during Mr. Trump’s immigration sweeps, and Democrats demanded guardrails to rein in the officers’ tactics and conduct.
Mr. Trump and Republicans refused to yield to a number of Democrats’s demands, including barring immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to obtain warrants for searches. Unable to reach a bipartisan agreement to allow a regular spending bill to move forward, Senate Republicans and Democrats struck a deal to fund everything except for the immigration enforcement agencies.
Even then, the deal languished for weeks because conservatives in the House refused to vote for a regular spending bill that did not fund ICE and border patrol. House Republicans passed it only after the White House ordered them to do so.
In the interim, Mr. Trump said he was funding both agencies with money approved by Republicans tucked into the tax law enacted last year, which also passed using reconciliation.
Their use of a process meant to make it easier to do the politically risky work of enacting major budgetary policy to steer around normal appropriations has raised the specter of the maneuver becoming routine whenever lawmakers are unable to come to a consensus on spending.
“They’re using the partisan reconciliation process to pass a budget because they refused to negotiate through the normal appropriations process,” Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said. “We asked that ICE and C.B.P. be held to the same standards as every other responsible law enforcement agency in this country. Republicans said ‘no.’ They said no to everything.”
