Rep. Pressley To Vote No On Funding Package

New Congress — Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., waves to the audience during swearing-in ceremony of Congressional Black Caucus members of the 116th Congress at The Warner Theatre in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019.

Kaitlyn Locke is a digital associate producer for GBH News. Before joining GBH, she worked as a homepage producer and Living/Arts correspondent for The Boston Globe. She studied journalism and Spanish at Boston University.

February 14, 2019

U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley will vote no on the FY2019 funding package released this morning that, if passed, will allocate some money for a wall along the southern U.S.-Mexico border, the Massachusetts congresswoman announced Thursday in a joint statement with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

"By any reasonable measure, Donald Trump’s weaponization of ICE and CBP has been a failure," the statement says, outlining what the congresswomen call the failures of the government agencies as reasons why they do "not deserve an increase in funding."

The funding package, while only a mere sliver of the billions President Donald Trump has demanded for a wall with Mexico, provides almost $1.4 billion for new barriers along the border. That's less than the $1.6 billion for border security in a bipartisan Senate bill that Trump spurned months ago, and enough for building just 55 miles of barricades, not the 200-plus miles he'd sought.

“We want to be abundantly clear: this is not a rebuke of federal workers or those who depend on the services they provide, but a rejection of the hateful policies, priorities, and rhetoric of the Trump Administration,” the congresswomen said in the statement.

The word "wall" doesn't appear once in the 1,768 pages of legislation, which instead includes references to "barriers" and "fencing." The measure would also allocate $7.6 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and another $14.9 billion to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, according to Pressley's statement. To the dismay of Democrats, it would still leave ICE holding thousands more immigrants than it did last year.

The compromise contains money for improved surveillance equipment, more customs agents and humanitarian aid for detained immigrants. The overall bill also provides $330 billion to finance dozens of federal programs for the rest of the year, one-fourth of federal agency budgets.

The product of nearly three weeks of talks, Trump is expected, but not yet guaranteed, to sign the funding bill to avoid another partial government shutdown before the Feb. 15 negotiation deadline.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.