With an end to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown in sight, House Republicans on Friday bristled at the deal their Senate colleagues sent them overnight, potentially imperiling the funding bill and threatening to extend the shutdown that’s led to worsening airport delays.
The Senate early Friday morning advanced a bill to fund most of DHS in a move to end the partial government shutdown that has disrupted air travel across the U.S., as Transportation Security Administration agents go without paychecks and miss work.
That bill immediately met resistance in the House. On a call with House Republicans Friday afternoon, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced the GOP would try to pass an eight-week stopgap funding bill for all of DHS, according two people who were on the call, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions. Any such effort would need to go back to the Senate for final approval and would extend the shutdown.
“There is a common disgust from our leadership team and from our members about what they did over in the Senate,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., told reporters at the Capitol on Friday. “It really was not appropriate.”
But that plan would likely not fly in the Senate, where most lawmakers have already left town. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Friday called the proposal “dead on arrival.”
“We’ve been clear from Day One: Democrats will fund critical Homeland Security functions — but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Schumer posted to X.
Schumer and other Democrats view the version of the bill that advanced out of the Senate largely as a win.
After weeks of Republicans fighting Democrats on their calls to remove funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement from any potential deal, the Senate bill does exactly that. It would fund all of DHS except for ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection, though it does not include the changes to ICE’s immigration enforcement practices that Democrats had demanded.
Those immigration enforcement cuts raised the hackles of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Talking with reporters at the Capitol, Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who chairs the group, said they would only support a version of the bill that adds back ICE and CBP funding, plus a federal voter identification requirement, a key component of an unrelated bill that President Donald Trump and his congressional allies had tied to DHS funding.
Any changes to the bill would require the Senate to reconvene and take up the legislation, which Harris suggested the upper chamber could next week — when the chamber is scheduled to be on recess.
“The only thing we’re going to support is adding that funding into the bill, adding that voter ID, sending it back to the Senate, make them come back and do their work,” Harris said.
House Democrats, meanwhile, expressed general support.
“The only thing standing between ending this chaos or not are House Republicans,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters. “There’s a bipartisan bill that emerged from the Senate with uniform support, and it should be brought to the floor immediately.”
Schumer similarly cast the bill’s passage as a win for Democrats.
“This could have been accomplished weeks ago if Republicans hadn’t stood in the way,” Schumer said. “Democrats held firm in our opposition that Donald Trump’s rogue and deadly militia should not get more funding without serious reforms, and we will continue to fight for those reforms,” Schumer said.
Senators had scrambled much of the week to strike a deal before the recess scheduled to start on Friday, but as talks broke down late Thursday, Trump intervened and announced via Truth Social that he would pay TSA agents via executive order.
“Because the Democrats have recklessly created a true National Crisis, I am using my authorities under the Law to protect our Great Country, as I always will do!,” Trump posted. “Therefore, I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports.”
The shutdown began in February in the weeks after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis as part of a federal immigration crackdown. Democrats demanded changes in ICE and DHS more broadly and refused to fund the department.
Friday’s vote was a step toward ending that impasse, though it was far from a kumbaya moment.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a statement that Democrats “remained intransigent and unreasonable” in their DHS funding demands.
“Congressional Democrats have done real damage to the appropriations process by repeatedly forcing government shutdowns and refusing to fund entire agencies,” Collins said. “Their refusal to fund ICE and Border Patrol leaves our borders and our country less secure and sets a precedent that they may one day come to regret.”
Republicans have vowed to restore funding to ICE via a second party-line legislative package using the Senate “budget reconciliation” procedure they used to pass last year’s tax and spending bill. Republicans’ next measure with ICE funding may also include a grab bag of other issues, including defense funding and the SAVE America Act, a Trump-backed voter ID and noncitizen voting bill that has captivated the right flank of the GOP in recent months.
“This bill will focus on ensuring ICE and other vital functions of homeland security, as well as the U.S. military and efforts to increase voter integrity, are Democrat-resistance proof,” Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a post to X on Thursday.
Budget reconciliation is a procedural tool that requires only a simple majority to pass — as opposed to the 60 votes usually required to overcome a filibuster in the Senate — provided its components have some spending or revenue impact.
—Dan Mangan and Karen Sloan contributed to this report.
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