As a Friday deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security approaches, Democrats and Republicans appeared no closer on Sunday to a deal to keep the department running.
“If I had to say now, I probably would expect there is a shutdown,” said Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
In the wake of federal immigration officers’ killings of two American citizens in Minnesota last month, Democrats have demanded a host of new restrictions on immigration enforcement operations as a condition for a new spending bill.
They include barring immigration officers from wearing masks, requiring them to show visible identification and mandating the use of judicial warrants when they enter private property to make arrests.
“Dramatic changes are necessary to the manner in which the Department of Homeland Security officers are conducting themselves before any funding bill should move forward,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Republican leaders have rejected those proposals as an unrealistic wish list, calling the new restrictions overly burdensome to an immigration crackdown that they generally support.
“They are threatening the safety and security of our agents so that they can’t do their job,” Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is something we need to look at carefully. The request that we should put ICE agents in harm’s way is absolutely intolerable.”
Mr. Jeffries said Democrats had not heard a response to their proposals from the White House or Republican leaders in Congress. “The ball is in the court right now of the Republicans,” he said.
A spokesman for Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Saturday that the party had not received any legislative text.
Though Congress passed a stopgap spending bill last week, if no deal passes both chambers, the department and the agencies it oversees will shut down on Saturday.
Mr. Thune said last week that he could put forth another stopgap measure as soon as Monday if there continued to be no progress in the negotiations. But a temporary spending bill would require the support of at least seven Democratic senators to move forward.
If no deal can be reached before the deadline, a shutdown would affect the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and the Transportation Security Administration. Many of those agencies would continue operating in some capacity, but their employees would have to go without pay.
Some Democrats have suggested funding those agencies separately while they continue to negotiate limits on federal immigration agencies, including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
The post Talks on Immigration Enforcement Limits Still Stuck With Deadline Nearing appeared first on New York Times.
