Republicans use LA protests to push holdouts to pass Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’

House Speaker Mike Johnson says ‘it's those men and women, the federal law enforcement officers who deserve our support right now’

The ongoing chaos and clashes with immigration enforcement in Los Angeles have given Republican leadership a new talking point to convince their on-the-fence members to pass the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

During his weekly press conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson featured images of the clashes with law enforcement in Los Angeles, including one with a demonstrator standing on top of a burnt car waving a Guatemalan flag. Johnson said that California Gov. Gavin Newsom deserved to be “tarred and feathered.”

“Because, you know, it's those men and women, the federal law enforcement officers who deserve our support right now,” Johnson told reporters.

The legislation, which Senate Republicans are now deliberating, includes money to hire more than 10,000 agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and 3,000 Border Patrol agents, who are part of the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington told The Independent that the demonstrations, which began with protests after ICE conducted raids in Los Angeles on Friday, made the need to vote on the bill in the Senate more urgent.

U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) said clashes with law enforcement in Los Angeles emphasized the need to pass the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ through the Senate. (Getty)

“It's more important than ever to have the resources again, not just to deport and detain people, which is, by the way, just enforcing the law,” Arrington told The Independent. “But to defend our own federal law enforcement officers against radical leftist rioters.”

Senate Republicans plan to pass the bill, which also includes an extension of the 2017 tax cuts that Trump signed, increasing spending for the US military and oil drilling, using the process of reconciliation. That would allow them to sidestep a filibuster as long as the legislation relates to the federal budget.

But some Republicans, such as Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, want the bill to do more to reduce the deficit.

“I would have already had the border funding passed, I would have had the extension of the tax law passed,” he told The Independent. “So we had a massive tax credit taken off the table. But we are where we are. So those are certainly the things that I support in the House bill.”

Johnson remains a holdout for the bill, even though Trump had previously hoped to pass the bill into law by July 4. But even Sen. Josh Hawley, who has raised concerns about cuts to Medicaid, said that the demonstrations and clashes with law enforcement warranted the bill’s passage.

“I think it means that the provisions for the border wall, for ICE, for detention facilities are more important than ever,” Hawley told The Independent.

In response to the pushback of the ICE raids, Trump deployed the US National Guard to Los Angeles, which Newsom criticized, saying the president did so without cause. The president also deployed 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, criticized the deployment.

“So they're doing everything in their power to stage a confrontation, because they've got no positive public policy agenda for the country, and Donald Trump's primary policy passion here has been tariffs, which have been a disaster for small business and for the economy,” Raskin told The Independent. “So the whole thing is an attempt to change the subject by provoking some kind of dramatic, violent confrontation.”

But Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Democrats were being hypocritical for complaining that Trump doesn’t follow the law.

“The President and the governor's number one responsibility is to protect the people,” he told The Independent.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump campaigned heavily on conducting mass deportations of immigrants in the country illegally.

He made Stephen Miller, his longtime adviser and an immigration hardliner, his deputy chief of staff. He also brought back Tom Homan, who served as acting director for ICE, as his “border czar.”

Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma told The Independent that Republicans had many reasons to pass the bill, but immigration was top among them.

The bill itself increases the number of ICE agents, for instance, nationally, and removes the pressure on them,” Lankford said. “They've got just the quantity of enforcement that they have with literally millions of people that are here to have more support to be able to do that significantly.”