The White House on Tuesday detailed its counteroffer to congressional Democrats in negotiations to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which has been shut down for more than four weeks leading to long lines at some airports.
Democrats have demanded that Republicans agree to new accountability measures for immigration enforcement agents after officials killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota during the agency’s Operation Metro Surge.
In a letter to Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee reviewed by The Washington Post, White House border czar Tom Homan and legislative director James Braid said they took steps toward meeting Democrats’ requests, having “offered to codify improved operational guidelines to its immigration enforcement operations.”
White House negotiators said they offered to expand the use of body cameras, limit enforcement activities at some sensitive locations with exceptions and require that officers identify themselves. The administration also said they would create mandatory reviews and compliance audits with the DHS inspector general.
The letter is the most detailed account to surface in weeks of internal negotiations between the White House and top Democrats in Congress, who have swapped multiple offers to unlock DHS funding but remain at an impasse.
Employees at the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of DHS, missed their first full paycheck on Friday. TSA agents have been calling out of work in larger numbers since the shutdown began. More than 300 employees at TSA have quit, according to DHS, contributing to increased wait times at major airports around the country.
White House negotiators dismissed the Democrats’ proposal as one that would “make it impossible to fully protect American citizens” from undocumented immigrants and endanger law enforcement. They said the Democrats’ offer fails to “show a good-faith attempt to compromise.”
The White House offer does not address several of the Democrats’ top priorities, including requiring judicial warrants to enter private properties and barring agents from wearing masks, which obscures identities. It also ignores Democrats’ request that DHS adheres to and enforces a policy that bars excessive use of force, similar to state and local police oversight.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday that Democrats were “trying to move a little bit” in their latest offer. He blamed the White House for refusing to make concessions on two of the Democrats’ top demands: barring federal agents from entering private property without judicial warrants and banning them from wearing face masks.
“They haven’t budged on those,” Schumer told reporters. “They’ve got to get serious.”
A senior White House official told reporters that the White House’s latest proposal stands as a “good faith attempt to try to come to a reasonable and expeditious conclusion” to the shutdown.
“The parties remain far apart, in large part, because the administration has put forward a five-part serious proposal that we are willing to engage in additional conversations on, but that has not been reciprocated in kind,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal negotiations.
The official was noncommittal about whether the administration would continue to negotiate over arrests without judicial warrants. They added that negotiators had not made enough progress to set up a meeting between President Donald Trump and Senate Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters Tuesday that the White House’s offer represents “significant gives” and argued that Democrats are “intent on dragging out this political issue.”
DHS has been able to continue much of its immigration enforcement efforts under the prolonged shutdown due to an influx of funding from the Republican tax and spending bill passed last year. DHS received $170 billion, including $75 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone.
But DHS also includes the TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard. More than 100,000 employees are working without pay, according to DHS.
Democrats have unsuccessfully attempted to advance measures that would fund DHS’s non-immigration-related agencies. The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) plans to launch a discharge petition in the House to do so this week — a tool that would force a vote on the legislation if a handful of Republicans joined all the chamber’s Democrats in supporting it.
“Why do we want to hold hostage those workers who are killing themselves out there every day and they’re not getting paid? Let us take care of them,” she said Tuesday.
Theodoric Meyer and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
The post White House details offer to end partial government shutdown appeared first on Washington Post.
