Democrats said Monday they have no plans to end their blockade of Department of Homeland Security funding in the face of GOP pressure to capitulate after President Donald Trump’s sweeping strikes on Iran.
Congressional Republicans insist the military conflict makes ending the 17-day DHS shutdown even more urgent, given the agency’s role in counterterrorism and domestic security.
But Democrats say they’ve been clear from the beginning that if Republicans want their votes, they must agree to changes to how the Trump administration carries out its immigration enforcement agenda.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, flatly rejected the suggestion that war with Iran should change his party’s shutdown posture.
“No,” he said in an interview. “We gave fair warning to the Republicans that we were serious about reining in what the ICE forces are doing. What we’re talking about is responsible.”
As an alternative, many Democrats are willing to fund DHS agencies that don’t deal with immigration enforcement. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, introduced a bill almost three weeks ago that would fund parts of DHS including the Coast Guard, TSA, Secret Service, FEMA and the nation’s cybersecurity agency through Sept. 30.
“There’s no disagreement on any of that. We could move forward and fund those for the rest of the year, and then have the negotiation” on ICE and Customs and Border Protection, DeLauro said in an interview Monday night. “But this is about their politics.”
Splitting up the DHS bill is something Republicans have opposed since the funding lapse started. According to three people granted anonymity to disclose private strategy, House and Senate GOP leaders see no reason to change their views now.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) said in an interview Monday that Democrats are “putting the country at risk” by not funding DHS and that they “should work with the administration to come up with something they can vote for.”
A group of Republicans in the Texas legislature cited a deadly Sunday morning shooting in Austin in urging congressional leaders to “pass full, unencumbered funding for DHS without delay.” Authorities are investigating whether the Iran attack motivated the gunman, who was killed by law enforcement.
Because a huge proportion of DHS employees work on “essential” national security related tasks, agency furloughs have been limited, though administrative and planning work is largely on pause. That means most TSA screeners, FEMA workers and Coast Guard members are at work but not being paid as the shutdown stretches past two weeks.
Immigration enforcement agencies are still active during the DHS shutdown, and they have billions of dollars already in their coffers from the GOP megabill Republicans passed last summer.
The standoff leaves the two sides largely stuck at loggerheads with no clear path to ending the partial government shutdown anytime soon.
House GOP leaders are planning a second vote on DHS funding Thursday — on a bill that has only minor changes from the measure the House passed on Jan. 22. That was just days before the killing of a 37-year-old man in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents prompted Senate Democrats to demand major policy changes in return for their votes.
At least seven Democrats would need to support a DHS funding bill to end debate under Senate filibuster rules.
Speaker Mike Johnson told House Republicans in a private call Sunday night that funding DHS operations will be a priority for the House GOP amid the Iran war fallout, given the heightened security risk. Privately, GOP leaders are hoping to exacerbate a Democratic split on the vote and keep the focus away from their own internal divides over the war.
Democratic leaders in the House are whipping against the funding bill ahead of the Thursday vote, saying in a caucus memo it has “no new language to end the chaos caused by ICE in communities across the country.”
Seven House Democrats voted “yes” in January, but that was before federal agents shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — and even then, the funding fight sparked days of public sparring within the caucus.
And while Johnson could pick up at least a few Democratic votes, the modified bill is dead on arrival in the Senate. Only Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) has voted to advance the DHS bill, and there is no sign more of his Democratic colleagues are prepared to join him.
“I’ve heard Republicans suggest that we should fund ICE because they started an illegal war with Iran — that’s ridiculous,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), ranking member of the DHS Appropriations subcommittee. “The American public wants ICE to stop murdering people, and they also don’t want us at war with Iran.”
Democrats and the White House have been trading counteroffers for weeks without making much progress. Trump hasn’t sat down yet with congressional leaders, and each side is dismissing the other as making unworkable demands.
“They have not given us a serious offer, and they need to understand we’re taking this seriously,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, said in an interview Monday. “We want accountability and reforms to ICE in order to fund them.”
Mia McCarthy, Jennifer Scholtes, Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor contributed to this report.
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