President Donald Trump endorsed a plan Wednesday to end the nearly seven-week-old shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security by going around Democrats to fund parts of the agency.
Trump urged Republicans to send him a party-line bill by June 1 to fund two agencies within the department — Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol — using the reconciliation process, which would allow him to bypass Democrats, who had demanded new guardrails on those agencies in exchange for their votes. This process would allow Republicans to pass a funding bill with a simple majority and avoid a Democratic filibuster.
“We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won’t be able to stop us,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
Lawmakers have been at an impasse over DHS funding for 46 days in the longest partial shutdown on record, which the public has mostly encountered through long security lines at airports. Pressure has been building to resolve the shutdown, with polling indicating that Republicans are shouldering more of the blame.
Democrats had been demanding new restrictions on federal immigration agents operating in major cities, after they killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.
The new approach mirrors the deal that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) struck with Senate Democrats last week, which would fund DHS, except for ICE and Border Patrol, the two agencies most responsible for carrying out Trump’s campaign to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. But that plan ran into opposition in the House, where Republicans passed legislation to fund the entire agency for 60 days before leaving Washington for a two-week Easter break.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) acknowledged Wednesday that the chamber’s bill could not pass the Senate, where Democrats had declared it dead on arrival. Instead, Thune and Johnson plan to use reconciliation to fund ICE and Border Patrol for three years to insulate them “from future attempts by the Democrats to defund those agencies,” they said in a joint statement.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement that House Republicans’ refusal to accept the Senate bill for days had “derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction.”
If successful, Republicans’ proposed plan would mark a novel, partisan approach to Congress’s most fundamental role — appropriating full-year funding for federal agencies.
“That gives an awful lot of authority to the executive branch to determine what to spend, where they want to spend it, and no guidance, quite frankly, from the legislative branch on how the money for each agency ought to be allocated and spent,” said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former adviser to Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee.
Democrats refused to fund ICE and Border Patrol until Republicans agreed on the need to obtain judicial warrants before agents can enter private property to make arrests and bar them from wearing masks, among other demands. The agencies have been able to continue operations using $150 billion in funding that Republicans passed last year via reconciliation.
Republicans have been mulling a second reconciliation package ahead of the midterm elections but have struggled to coalesce around policies that could get enough support in both chambers, which Republican control with slim margins.
Using the reconciliation process to fund DHS could create a political incentive for the Republican conference to unify behind new legislation. But it won’t be simple. Multiple factions in the party would probably seek to attach their preferred policies to the package. Some lawmakers could feel pressure to cut popular programs to balance additional spending. Plus Democrats could force multiple politically uncomfortable votes in the process.
“Reconciliation is never easy, always complicated,” Thune told reporters Friday, even as he endorsed the approach.
Sen. John Hoeven (R-North Dakota) said Monday that Republicans should fund DHS for the next three years through reconciliation to avoid contentious negotiations with Democrats in the future.
“We’re not going through this again with the Dems,” Hoeven told reporters.
Other Republicans across both chambers also have endorsed the idea.
Rep. Tom Emmer (Minnesota), the No. 3 House Republican, told CNBC on Wednesday that if DHS hasn’t been funded by the time lawmakers return to Washington on April 14, “you’ll see a skinny reconciliation bill move very quickly.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he had urged his colleagues to take a more aggressive approach: using reconciliation to fund ICE for 10 years and giving the agency 10 percent more money than current funding levels.
“Elizabeth Warren and Charles E. Schumer are right now crowing to the left, ‘Haha, we got everyone to defund ICE. Look how successful we are,’” Cruz said Monday on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.” “I want to say, ‘Stick it where the sun don’t shine. The effect of your ridiculousness is you increased funding for ICE by 10 percent and got it funded for 10 years.’”
The Senate could take a step toward funding DHS — except for ICE and Border Patrol — as soon as Thursday, when the chamber is scheduled to convene for a brief ceremonial sessions. House Democrats have indicated they will not block the legislation, but at least some House Republicans are already against the plan. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) described it as “caving to Democrats.”
“Funding for ICE and CBP must never be separated from DHS funding,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) wrote on social media. “If Republicans isolate it, they’re handing our border and ICE agents straight to the radicals who will defund and dismantle them every chance they get.”
The proposed approach is not the first time the administration has bypassed traditional appropriations processes. Last year, it unilaterally froze grants and other spending for Democratic states and clawed back billions of dollars without congressional approval.
Trump’s endorsement of using reconciliation to fund ICE and Border Patrol comes as lawmakers have been under pressure to resolve the shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. Long airport lines finally eased off this week, after Trump decided to pay Transportation Security Administration officers without waiting for Congress to strike a deal.
TMZ, the celebrity gossip news site, has asked readers to send in photos of members of Congress since they left Washington last week on their recess without reaching a deal to reopen DHS. The site has published photos of lawmakers outside their states and districts, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) boarding the Space Mountain ride at Disney World and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California) at a Las Vegas casino.
(Graham said in a statement that he had traveled to South Florida on Friday to meet with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and went to Orlando afterward to meet friends. Garcia wrote on X that he had been having lunch with his father, who lives in Las Vegas.)
Thirty-six percent of American blame Republicans most for the shutdown and 29 percent blame Democrats, according to an Economist-YouGov poll conducted between Friday and Monday. A CNN poll conducted between Thursday and Monday found that 39 percent of American blame Trump and Republicans most while 25 percent blame Democrats.
But fewer Americans described the current shutdown as a crisis than the one in October, when the entire federal government was shuttered, according to CNN polling.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who has held several town hall meetings this week, said he had gotten more questions about the war in Iran than the shutdown.
Kadia Goba and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
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