House GOP passes 8-week Homeland Security funding; shutdown continues with rejection of Senate bill

The six-week shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security will continue at least until mid-April after House Republicans rejected a partial funding bill passed by the Senate in favor of a stopgap measure that lacks the Democratic support needed to become law.

Record airport security wait times caused by Transportation Administration officers calling in for work are likely to dissipate, however, after President Trump signed an executive order Friday directing DHS to find another funding stream to pay TSA officers. Those paychecks are expected to start going out Monday.

The House passed the eight-week DHS spending stopgap measure Friday night in a largely partisan vote of 213-203.

Immediately thereafter, the House adjourned and joined the Senate in leaving Washington for a two-week recess for the Easter and Passover holidays.

House Republicans rejected the DHS appropriations bill passed by the Senate because it did not include funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

“We live in dangerous times in America. Now is not the time to defund the police, or the Department of Homeland Security, at any level,” said Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, the majority in the House.

The shutdown has not impacted immigration enforcement, as Republicans passed $170 billion in multi-year funding for DHS to use for this purpose as part of their One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers continued to be paid during the shutdown with this funding, which is the amount of money the administration expects to use to pay TSA officers.

“ICE is funded. Stop the BS. Stop the misinformation that somehow ICE is not funded,” Rep. Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, told Republicans during the floor debate on the stopgap.

Three Democrats — Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Don Davis of North Carolina and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state — voted with Republicans in favor of the measure.

“Moving away from DHS funding will not solve anything for ICE and it will hurt a lot of hard-working people,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez said. “Ideological purity that strengthens a broken system and harms working people is not what I was sent to Congress to participate in.” »

Other Democrats voted against it and criticized Republicans for blocking the Senate bill, which passed by voice vote Friday morning with no senators objecting.

“They know this is a continuation of the shutdown. The Senate is gone,” said House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts. “They say we want the status quo, that we are so eager to keep ICE operating in exactly the way that they operate recklessly, illegally and violently, that is our priority over that of the American people.”

Senate Democrats obstructed a full-year DHS funding bill that the House passed in January after immigration enforcement agents killed U.S. citizen Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the second such death after Renee Good.

They demanded a series of changes in immigration policy, such as requiring agents to unmask and carry identification, use court warrants for arrests on private property, and avoid schools, hospitals and other “sensitive locations.”

Republicans and the White House attempted to negotiate with Democrats and offered compromise on some proposals, such as agent identification and sensitive locations, but no agreement was ever reached.

Senate Republicans then tried to pass a DHS funding bill that cut $5.5 billion for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, but Democrats still opposed it.

The bill that the Senate ultimately passed included no funding for ICE, including for its Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts human trafficking investigations. The measure also did not fund Customs and Border Protection’s immigration and border security functions, only customs functions.

“This lineup that was done last night is a joke,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said Friday afternoon. “It is unconscionable to me that the Democrats are forcing some sort of negotiation at 3 a.m. and trying to get this through to the American people and then boarding their planes and going home on vacation pretending and thinking we’re going to accept this.”

Mr. Johnson called the Republican Party’s eight-week stopgap measure funding the entire DHS “the right thing, morally, legally and politically.”

The speaker said later Friday that he had spoken to Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota and that a Republican senator would try to circumvent the stopgap in a pro forma session on Monday.

A Democratic senator is expected to oppose it, as Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer has warned that the stopgap “is dead on arrival in the Senate.”

“We have been clear from day one: Democrats will fund essential Homeland Security functions – but we will not give Trump’s murderous illegal immigration militias a blank check without reforms,” the New York Democrat said.

Congress is not expected to return to Washington until the week of April 13.

Over the next two weeks, tens of thousands of DHS workers will continue to work without pay during this time, and non-essential department functions will remain suspended.

Senate Republicans said they caved to Democrats and agreed not to fund ICE or the Border Patrol in the annual appropriations bill aimed at ending the shutdown of other DHS agencies, including the TSA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Secret Service.

Mr. Thune said ICE and CBP are funded by OBBB and will receive even more funding under a second GOP budget reconciliation package.

Mr. Johnson, who for months pushed for a second reconciliation package when Mr. Thune and others doubted that Republicans could muster enough votes to pass one, changed his tune Friday and called the reconciliation effort a “very difficult task” and a “high-risk gamble.”

House Republicans also said the suggestion that all of ICE and CBP would be funded by OBBB was not true.

“Front-line staff are primarily funded… but that leaves out civilian and support staff,” Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy said.

Mr. Cuellar, the top Democratic official at DHS, told reporters that the administration has the authority to tap OBBB funding to pay ICE and CBP support staff.

“They can do it at any time,” he said.