Hawley, Tim Tebow Win Child Protection in Senate DHS Funding Bill, Reconciliation 2.0

The Senate GOP is taking the next steps to pass legislation to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security this week. Thanks to pro-family GOP senators, key legislation to protect children will be included in the long-awaited Reconciliation 2.0.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced that the Secure America Act will “hopefully” be voted on this week. The bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) passed out of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Tuesday and included legislation pushed by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Tim Tebow, to protect the exploitation of children online.

“This will be a tremendous step forward to be able to do something very tangible and very immediate to help children who have been harmed in the worst possible way by the online world,” Hawley said in a press release.

Committee member Hawley saw his continued advocacy for the Renewed Hope Act pay off.

The Renewed Hope Act of 2026, originally introduced in January by Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., has been championed by Hawley in the Senate. The language in the Secure America Act, Rec. 2.0, will provide DHS with a “generational investment” to hire 200 child exploitation investigators and forensic analysts. The department currently has funding for only seven roles to investigate the hundreds of thousands of cases in which children are in danger online.

Earlier this year, Hawley hosted Tebow, the former NFL football player and founder of the Tim Tebow Foundation, to testify before Congress on the urgent need to pass the Renewed Hope Act and provide adequate resources.

“Our country’s most precious and vulnerable lives have been forgotten. Every day, these children lose hope, and it’s not the fault of law enforcement that these children wait. They need more resources, plain and simple,” Tebow told The Daily Signal ahead of the March hearing.

Tebow testified that in less than a year, 338,000 unique IP addresses downloaded or shared child-rape images portraying nearly 90,000 unidentified children in the United States. Because of the lack of funding, many of these cases go uninvestigated or unsolved.

Led by Homeland Security Investigations under DHS, the bill provides $108.5 million to hire the new staff.

Specifically, the bill provides for 40 forensic analysts and 30 child exploitation investigators at the Victim Identification Laboratory within the Child Exploitation Investigations Unit, as well as 130 additional analysts and investigators. It also establishes a victim identification training program for federal, state, and local law enforcement to better coordinate efforts.

“This legislation gives our nation the opportunity to build a stronger rescue team of analysts and investigators so that children who are suffering can be identified and protected,” Tebow continued in his March comment.

“This week we’re going to vote on the Secure America Act, which is a piece of legislation that will fund ICE and CBP not only for this year but through the entirety of the Trump administration,” Thune told reporters.

Chairman Rand Paul said the committee’s markup of the bill, along with back-and-forth communication with the Senate parliamentarian, included 57 amendments to the final bill and passed by an 8-5 vote. The DHS funding bill, which Thune referred to as the Secure America Act, will allocate nearly $23 billion to fund ICE and CBP. This is down roughly $50 billion from the first proposal package presented by the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, which included $1 billion for the security project at the White House East Wing.