Congress is one step closer to ending the Homeland Security shutdown after the Senate advanced a new, last-minute deal, but it came at the price of Republicans ceding ground, temporarily, to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The Senate unanimously advanced a deal to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the wee hours of Friday morning, 42 days into the shutdown that was spurred by the Trump administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota.
It was an agreement that largely gave Schumer and Senate Democrats what they wanted — no funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). But it lacked the stringent reforms they desired, like requiring judicial warrants or requiring agents to unmask.
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While the deal mirrors previous attempts by Democrats to pass similar legislation that carved out immigration funding, Thune argued that Democrats are still walking away empty-handed in the policy fight over immigration enforcement.
“We’ve been trying for weeks to fund the whole thing,” Thune said. “And, I mean, in the end, this is what they were willing to agree to. But again, it’s different that it has zero reforms in it. I mean, they got no reforms on DHS, which they could have had if they had been willing to work with us a little bit on that.”
Schumer said that if Republicans hadn’t blocked their initial attempts, “this could have been done three weeks ago.”
“This is exactly what we wanted,” Schumer said. “This is what we asked for, and I’m very proud of my caucus. My caucus held the line.”
The DHS funding deal now heads to the House, where Republicans aren’t enthusiastic about not funding key components of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown agenda.
The latest plan came after Senate Democrats blocked a seventh attempt to reopen DHS, after back-and-forth talks throughout the day on Thursday appeared to yield little progress toward a resolution. Trump also announced his intent to sign an order that would pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents as major airports are rocked with staggering lines and eye-popping wait times amid the shutdown.
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While a further concession to Democrats, in part, the underlying argument Republicans have made all along is that if Schumer and his caucus wanted reforms, they would have to agree to fund immigration enforcement.
And ICE and CBP are still flush with roughly $75 billion in cash from Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” giving the agencies a buffer for a time.
“The good news is we anticipated this a year ago. I mean, one of the reasons we front loaded, pre-loaded up the ‘one big, beautiful bill’ with advanced funding for Homeland Security was because we anticipated this was likely going to happen, and it did,” Thune said. “I still think it’s unfortunate. The Dems wanted reforms. We tried to work with them on reforms. They ended up getting no reforms.”
The same process used to pass that colossal legislative package will likely be turned to again fund immigration enforcement.
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Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., envisions funding ICE and CBP for several years.
“Democrats are trying to shut down ICE funding for the remainder of the fiscal year — ultimately they won’t be successful,” Schmitt said on X. “In response, I’ll be pushing to lock in funding for deportation operations and salaries for a decade.”
Doing so could be difficult, still, given that Republicans want to dump several other priorities into the mix, including portions of the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act and funding for the Iran war.
And some Republicans are already couching expectations on what can and can’t be accomplished in the party-line process, given that anything in the bill has to pass muster with strict rules in the Senate.
“I think we have to set our sights a little bit lower on this reconciliation bill,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “It’s got to be targeted to fund ICE for 10 years, I think that’s the number one thing to us.”