BREAKING: Senate passes deal to fund DHS without Dem demands to ‘reform’ ICE
The GOP had been pushing to fund all of DHS while the Democrats were looking to pass funding for other parts of DHS aside from ICE.
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The GOP had been pushing to fund all of DHS while the Democrats were looking to pass funding for other parts of DHS aside from ICE.
Early on Friday morning, the Senators were able to come to a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide funding for TSA, but not for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as parts of Customs and Border Patrol.
The deal was unanimously advanced after 42 days where the Democrats have been refusing to fund the whole of DHS amid a partial government shutdown. As the shutdown has gone on, TSA agents have worked without pay, causing long lines at airports as call-out rates skyrocketed. The GOP had been pushing to fund all of DHS while the Democrats were looking to pass funding for other parts of DHS aside from ICE as well as pass a number of policy restrictions on ICE as an agency.
The reform policies did not make it into the bill deal as the Democrats desired, and but they got their wish to not fund ICE; this is despite the agency already being funded by separate cash that was floated to the agency through the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last year. The amount totaled roughly $75 billion and has been funding CBP as well as ICE amid the shutdown of DHS.
The deal that passed in the Senate includes funding for TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, CISA, and the Coast Guard. Parts of CBP are funded and there was no funding for ICE included. Democrats had been pushing for changes at ICE that would hamper their operations, including the requirement of getting a judicial warrant instead of an administrative warrant to arrest illegal immigrants.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said, "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. I still think it's unfortunate. The Dems wanted reforms. We tried to work with them on reforms. They ended up getting no reforms."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed that a deal could have been reached weeks ago, even though earlier this week the Democrats rejected a similar deal that would have not passed the reforms and only partially funded ICE. When Schumer rejected the previous deal he said, “We have to rein in ICE and stop the violence. We need reform." The reforms, however, were not included in the deal that passed.
The deal now has to go through the House of Representatives before it can be sent to President Trump's desk to be signed.
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