House Republicans plan to vote Friday night on an eight-week measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday, rejecting a separate deal that the Republican-led Senate passed earlier in the day.
The inter-chamber squabble appears likely to lead to a continued stalemate over the department, which has gone unfunded since Feb. 14 — leading to lengthy delays at some airports across the country — as Senate Democrats have already said they would not support the House’s proposal.
“The Republicans are not going to be any part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” said Johnson (R-Louisiana), seeking to blame Democrats for the deal cut with Republicans in the Senate.
Johnson called the Senate proposal “a joke” and argued that workers at the Transportation Security Administration would be paid while lawmakers wait for the Senate to take up the House measure.
President Donald Trump issued an order Friday to use preexisting funds to pay TSA agents. DHS said Friday that TSA agents would start seeing paychecks as early as Monday.
Johnson said that he spoke to Trump on Friday afternoon “and he understands exactly what we’re doing and why.”
The Senate bill would fund all of DHS, including the TSA, except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The House bill would temporarily fund the entire department. The chamber is expected to vote on the measure around 10:30 Friday night.
Neither measure includes any of the new accountability measures for ICE and CBP that Democrats have demanded.
House Republicans have raised concerns that the Senate bill does not include the Save America Act — a sweeping voting bill championed by Trump that House Republicans have demanded the Senate pass — and that it would not appropriate money for the administration’s deportation efforts.
On Friday morning, House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-Maryland) called the Senate’s plan “bad for Americans” and told reporters that his ultraconservative cohort would not support any funding bill that doesn’t include the voting measure.
But House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa C. McClain (Michigan) said in an interview with The Washington Post that the Freedom Caucus and other ideological factions within the party are on board.
“It’s not perfect, right? Everyone has a little bit of their personal pet peeve or whatnot that they want in there, but everybody understands what we’re doing. We’re not going to get jammed,” McClain said.
She added that the House plans to leave town once it has passed the funding extension, though its members are ready “to come back on a moment’s notice” if need be.
House leaders indicated to members Friday morning that votes were “possible” later in the day or over the weekend and advised them to stay in Washington. The chamber had been scheduled to leave for a two-week recess Friday afternoon.
The House’s proposal would need at least seven Democratic votes in the Senate to pass if all Senate Republicans supported it. Sixty votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. Senate Democrats have already said that’s not going to happen.
“Senate Democrats worked with Senate Republicans to reach a UNANIMOUS agreement to fund vital functions at DHS,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement Friday. An eight-week funding extension “that locks in the status quo is dead on arrival in the Senate, and Republicans know it.”
It’s not clear that Senate Republicans would support such a deal, either. A Senate GOP aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal deliberations, said there is a “zero percent” chance the Senate approves the House proposal.
The Senate passed its agreement by voice vote with only a handful of senators in the chamber in the early-morning hours Friday before leaving town for the previously scheduled two-week recess.
Democrats in Congress have refused to fund DHS until Republicans agree to impose new restrictions on federal immigration agents after two U.S. citizens were killed by agents in Minneapolis in January, sparking widespread outrage. The standoff triggered a partial shutdown of DHS starting Feb. 14.
Lawmakers have felt increasing pressure to strike a deal as TSA officers have gone unpaid and delays have mounted at security checkpoints in airports across the country, largely because of staffing problems at TSA.
In the Senate deal, neither Republicans nor Democrats would get what they want.
That bill is similar to legislation Democrats tried to pass weeks ago that would have funded DHS except for ICE, CBP and the secretary’s office. Republicans blocked it several times because it did not fund the entirety of DHS.
Democrats secured none of the restrictions that they have been seeking, including some provisions that White House officials said they would accept if Democrats agreed to fund ICE, such as requiring federal agents to wear identification and body cameras and restricting them from operating near places such as hospitals and schools. Democrats also wanted to require agents to obtain judicial warrants before entering private property and to bar agents from wearing masks, among other demands.
“They got no reforms on DHS, which they could have had if they had been willing to work with us a little bit on that,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters.
While the bill does not include funding for ICE or the Border Patrol, that would not prevent them from operating because Republicans directed tens of billions of dollars in extra funding to those agencies last year.
Senate Republicans plan to use the reconciliation process — which allows the Senate to pass legislation with a simple majority and avoid a filibuster as long it complies with obscure budget rules — to send even more funding to ICE, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
“What’s coming next is going to supercharge deportations,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) said on the Senate floor.
Trump expressed ambivalence about Senate Republicans’ proposal to reopen DHS earlier this week, and he has repeatedly looked for ways to strong-arm the Democrats into folding. On Sunday, he wrote on social media that Republicans should not “make any deal” with Democrats until they support the Save America Act, which Senate Democrats unanimously oppose. That same day, he ordered ICE agents to deploy to major airports to help manage security lines, but the effort has done little to alleviate delays.
“They need to end the shutdown immediately, or we’ll have to take some very drastic measures,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Thursday.
Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
correctionA previous version of this story misstated the magnitude of additional funding that Congress sent to ICE last year. It was tens of billions of dollars.
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