Trump mocks Schumer on Truth Social for his Senate floor ICE near gaffe
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President Donald Trump mocked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for a near gaffe Saturday on the Senate floor.
“Schumer was ‘baffled’ on the Senate floor yesterday and said ‘WE HAVE TO FUND ICE,’ before correcting himself,” Trump wrote Sunday morning on Truth Social. “Thanks Chuck, I agree!”
Schumer and Senate Democrats are obstructing the SAVE America Act — an election integrity bill — but the minority leader was arguing that Republicans are responsible for the government shutdown that has left U.S. airline passengers frustrated by long TSA wait times at airports across the country.
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President Donald Trump mocked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Sunday for mistakenly calling for urgent funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Schumer quickly corrected himself, saying, “We need to defund the TSA now,” but the irony was not lost on Trump, who has long reminded Americans that the government’s defunding of the Department of Homeland Security has no impact on real-time Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations because ICE was fully funded under last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Schumer’s call to “fund the TSA now” was linked to the failure of Senate Democrats’ efforts to isolate a funding plan just for the TSA, but Republicans blocked that effort, noting that remaining DHS funding, suspended due to the shutdown, is also vital to U.S. national security amid strikes on Iran.
Republicans negotiating on DHS, including Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairwoman Katie Britt, R-Ala., are meeting Sunday.
“There’s a lot of ideas swirling around right now, some of which you know my colleagues are talking about, but obviously what I feel is at least good news, and all that is is people realizing this needs to be fixed,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters as he left the Senate floor Sunday morning.
“This problem needs to be solved and, again, the best way to solve it is to get Democrats to support funding the entire Department of Homeland Security, you know, without cherry-picking certain aspects of it,” he said. “So we’ll see where the discussions go today.”
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In February, Democrats in Congress agreed to fund most of the government in exchange for withholding DHS funds following the fatal shooting of two anti-ICE agitators in Minnesota by immigration authorities.
The Senate failed to secure the 60-vote supermajority needed to advance a Republican proposal to fund the entire DHS earlier in March, after Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, opposed an earlier Democratic proposal to separately fund the TSA earlier.
Moreno separately proposed a two-week DHS funding extension, but Democrats blocked it.
Absences by TSA airport agents have already disrupted travel at some major airports over the past week, raising alarms among airlines as the peak spring break season reaches its peak. DHS funding expired on February 13.
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Airlines are expecting a record spring travel period, with 171 million passengers expected, up 4% from the same two-month period last year.
Reuters contributed to this report.
