The House on Tuesday passed a spending package to end the partial government shutdown and keep the Department of Homeland Security running while Democrats and President Trump negotiate over restrictions on the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The vote was 217 to 214 to send the measure to Mr. Trump’s desk, where he was expected to quickly sign the agreement to reopen major parts of the government since funding lapsed on Saturday But under the deal, the money for the Department of Homeland Security lasts just through the end of next week.
It capped an extraordinary spending fight that erupted 11 days ago, when the fatal shooting of an American citizen by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis torpedoed what had been a bipartisan deal to keep federal funding flowing and touched off a fevered round of negotiations. Senate Democrats demanded to tie any new homeland security money to limits on Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign.
But even though the president endorsed the deal, which he reached with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, conservative Republicans dissatisfied with the concessions it included nearly thwarted it in the House.
Speaker Mike Johnson struggled until the last moment to muster the votes to bring it up on Tuesday, haggling with an animated group of hard-line holdouts on the House floor for nearly an hour before he managed to cobble together a bare majority. Such messy and drawn-out scenes have become routine in the chamber, where Mr. Johnson is working with a razor-thin majority.
“I share the frustrations of many that the Senate altered our deal at the last minute,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee said. “But our obligation is not to those emotions — it’s to the American people.”
While enactment of the package will bring the current partial shutdown to a close, its passage only created another funding cliff for Mr. Trump and congressional leaders, who now have roughly 10 days to strike a deal imposing new restrictions on immigration agents. If they fail, regular funding for the Department of Homeland Security would lapse.
Democrats and Republicans are still far apart on the changes they are willing to agree to, and key Democrats have said they would not vote for another stopgap measure if a deal is not reached at the end of next week.
Most Democrats, 193 of them, voted against the spending deal on Tuesday, a reflection of how toxic funding the Department of Homeland Security and ICE has become in the party. Twenty-one supported it.
“I will not stand by and give any more money to Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem to bankroll an out of control operation that is terrorizing communities and shredding the Constitution,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, naming the president’s senior adviser and architect of his hard-line immigration policies and the homeland security secretary. “I am not interested in business as usual. Not for two more weeks; not for two more seconds.”
Twenty-one Republicans opposed the measure.
Mr. Trump, who did little to bring about a resolution to the last shutdown, made it clear from the start that he wanted to make a deal with Democrats this time and expected Republicans to embrace it. He met personally at the White House on Monday with conservatives who were threatening to derail its passage and sent emissaries to Capitol Hill to convince wary Republicans to back the agreement.
Mr. Schumer said in an earlier interview that Mr. Trump had told him that he was determined to avoid another shutdown after the nation suffered its longest closure in the fall.
“I hate shutdowns. I don’t like shutdowns,” Mr. Trump said, according to the Democratic leader. “We’ve got to stop them.”
In addition to the stopgap measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security for 10 additional days to leave time for bipartisan talks over new immigration enforcement restrictions, the legislation also would fund major parts of the government through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. Those include the Treasury, Education, Labor and State Departments and the Pentagon.
The package rejects the deep spending cuts the Trump administration had requested, but overall provide small across-the-board trims to many federal agencies.
With the immediate funding crunch over, lawmakers must now turn their attention to what promises to be a remarkably difficult negotiation to unlock longer-term funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Senate Democrats last week presented a set of demands that would need to accompany any more money for the department that included a prohibition on federal officers wearing masks and a requirement that federal agents wear body cameras and carry identification. Their proposal also would put an end to roving patrols and require warrants issued by a judge for arrests and searches.
Democrats have also demanded that federal agents be subject to the same use-of-force policies that apply to local and state law enforcement agencies, which require those involved in violent incidents to be subject to independent investigations if they are accused of wrongdoing.
“Absent bold and meaningful change, there is no credible path forward with respect to the Department of Homeland Security funding bill” on Feb. 13, when funding is set to lapse, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said in a statement after the vote. Mr. Jeffries was among the Democrats opposing the spending package on Tuesday.
Trump administration officials, eager to tamp down on at least some of the public outrage that bubbled up after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in less than a month, have already agreed to some changes. Ms. Noem said on Monday that all immigration officers on the ground in Minneapolis would be equipped with body cameras and would be expanded nationwide “as funding is available.”
But agreement on other changes appears more elusive. Mr. Johnson at a news conference on Tuesday ruled out requiring warrants for arrests and searches, and has previously said he is opposed to mandating that officers take their masks off.
“We do have to apply the Constitution. We have to respect it, and those parameters need to be determined,” Mr. Johnson said. “But I can tell you that we are never going to go along with adding an entirely new layer of judicial warrants, because it is unimplementable. It cannot be done and it should not be done, and it’s not necessary.”
Shortly after, Mr. Schumer fired back from the other side of the Capitol, calling it “absurd” for “the speaker and others like him to argue masked ICE agents should get special treatment and be held to a different standard than every other law enforcement agency.”
“ICE agents wearing masks and given special treatment is against the views of most Americans who want basic accountability,” Mr. Schumer said. “Anyone defending ICE agents keeping their masks on is not seriously trying to solve this huge problem of chaos we have seen in Minneapolis and so many other of our other cities.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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