Large swaths of the Department of Homeland Security are set to shut down Saturday after Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked two funding bills because the legislation did not include new restrictions on federal immigration agents.
Democrats demanded a long list of changes to DHS after federal immigration agents killed Alex Pretti last month in Minneapolis, including tighter rules on warrants and a ban on agents wearing face masks. President Donald Trump appeared open to some of them, but Democrats rejected a proposal the White House made Wednesday night, all but ensuring a partial government shutdown.
Every Democrat except one — Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) — voted Thursday against advancing legislation to fund DHS through Sept. 30 before lawmakers left town for a week-long recess.
“Today’s strong vote was a shot across the bow to Republicans,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said. “Democrats will not support a blank check for chaos.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) also blocked Republicans from extending DHS funding for two weeks, arguing that Democrats could not send the agency more money without new restraints on its agents.
“We have a constitutional obligation to only fund a Department of Homeland Security that is obeying the law, and this Department of Homeland Security is not obeying the law,” Murphy said on the Senate floor.
Republicans accused Democrats of being unreasonable and not allowing enough time for negotiations to play out. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said talks would continue but warned that Democrats would have to make concessions of their own.
“Democrats are never going to get their full wish list,” Thune said Thursday on the Senate floor. “That’s not the way this works.”
The Senate is not expected to hold any more votes before a shutdown starts at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, and many senators were set to leave town Thursday to travel to the Munich Security Conference. Schumer and Thune have said they are prepared to bring senators back early if a deal comes together.
The House would also need to pass any deal to fund the department. Republicans have a perilously narrow majority in the chamber, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said Thursday that the White House proposal was not enough to win House Democrats’ votes.
A funding lapse would trigger the third full or partial federal government shutdown in barely three months. The government shuttered for 43 days in the fall amid a standoff between the two parties over expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies; that was followed by a shutdown of much of the government for several days that ended last week.
This shutdown would affect only DHS — but it would not shutter U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection, because Republicans sent those agencies tens of billions of dollars in additional funding last year that would allow them to continue to operate.
Instead, the brunt of a shutdown would fall on the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard and other agencies within DHS. It would affect about 13 percent of the federal civilian workforce, most of whom would be forced to work without pay, according to data from DHS and the Office of Personnel Management.
Republicans have emphasized a shutdown’s impact on agencies unrelated to the administration’s immigration efforts if DHS funding lapses.
“A TSA agent is going to go without a paycheck,” Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama) said Thursday on the Senate floor. “Why? So that you can posture politically. I’m over it.”
Democrats and Republican negotiated a bipartisan deal last month to fund DHS, but Democrats rescinded their support for it after federal immigration agents killed Pretti in Minneapolis amid protests against the surge of agents there. Democrats dismissed the White House’s announcement Thursday that the DHS operation in Minnesota would end as insufficient to earn their support because Trump could reverse it.
“The announcement that the surge is over in Minneapolis changes in no way the tactics that are used there and across the country,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) told reporters. “There needs to be a complete overhaul of this department.”
Republicans faulted Democrats for not detailing their demands until last Saturday, which Republicans said did not leave enough time to negotiate an agreement. Those demands include requiring federal immigration agents to wear identification and body cameras and barring them from operating near schools, medical facilities, churches, polling places, child care facilities and courts. They also want to ensure that states and local jurisdictions can investigate and prosecute potential crimes committed by agents and excessive use of force, among other demands.
Democrats, meanwhile, criticized the White House for not sending the details of its proposal until Wednesday night. The White House was waiting for a response from Democrats as of Thursday afternoon, according to a senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump and other Republicans have criticized many of Democrats’ demands, arguing that they would needlessly hamstring federal immigration agents.
“They want our law enforcement to be totally vulnerable and put them in a lot of danger,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “They have some things that are really very hard to — very, very hard to approve, frankly.”
Emily Davies and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.
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