ICE Shooting In Minnesota Derails Homeland Security Spending Bill

The contentious debate over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killing a woman in Minneapolis has stalled progress on the annual funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security.

Bipartisan negotiators were planning to include the measure in a package of spending bills. But, after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week, Democrats stepped up calls to scale back resources for the agency or institute reforms for ICE’s procedures and equipment, complicating a final bill. The situation in Minnesota has continued to escalate, with President Donald Trump threatening Thursday to use the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops in Minnesota.

It’s an about-face from when Rep. Mark Amodei, chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, told reporters last week that negotiations and work over the holiday recess had pushed the bill into good shape. But there were early signs the bill could get controversial, when he told NOTUS in late November that the homeland bill would likely need a continuing resolution, or “CR.”

“Homeland is influenced less by anything in the bill than what’s going on in Minnesota right now,” Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said Thursday. “That’s nobody here’s fault, but that’s just the political reality you’ve got to deal with. You wait around and you get close to the deadline and something in the world happens, and it impacts whether you can pass a bill or not.”

While three of the four remaining appropriations bills in the House are slated to hit the floor, backlash to ICE’s operations in Minneapolis could mean that a bill providing money for the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t end up getting a vote. Instead, Congress could decide to extend current funding for another year.

Cole’s Democratic counterpart, DeLauro, said she puts the homeland bill in a “separate category” from the other three appropriations bills at this point, describing negotiations as “really, very tough.”

“Homeland was on track,” DeLauro said. “You got a tragedy of a gigantic proportion, and that has to have a very serious impact on what we do.”

Democrats and Republicans on the panel overseeing DHS spending do not seem to have an appetite to settle for a CR for the homeland bill. Amodei characterized the amount of issues left with the bill as less than he could count on one hand. The top leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees, though, have already had to buy time for the bill. They decided Sunday not to attach it to the other spending bills that moved through the House this week.

Leaders plan to decide by this Sunday whether the homeland bill will be added to the next package, which is expected to include the Labor-HHS and Defense funding bills. Cole and several other Republican appropriators, including the chairs of the House subcommittees for Labor-HHS, Defense, National Security and Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, met Wednesday with Speaker Mike Johnson.

Cole told NOTUS just after the meeting: “What we hope to do is post [the next package] before Sunday night.
We’re not quite there, but each different bill varies to different degrees, and we needed to get a little guidance from the Speaker on a couple things.” He declined to give more detail.

Across the Capitol, Sen. Katie Britt, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, told reporters Thursday that Republicans sent a counter offer on the homeland bill to Democrats this week but had not yet received a response. Cole noted conversations are underway with the Senate on whether the chamber would want a standalone vote on the homeland bill.

Other predictions for the bill’s future in the Senate were bleak.

“It depends a little bit on the timing and how this last package proceeds through the House and over here, but I would say, if there were a candidate for a CR, it’s probably most likely,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said of the homeland bill Thursday morning.

Sen. Chris Murphy, ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, told reporters Thursday: “We don’t have an update. We don’t have a bill.”

“Every single minute, we’re learning new ways that the department is acting lawlessly and ways that they are wasting taxpayer money, so we’re trying to be reasonable,” Murphy said.

Democrats, including Murphy, see an opening to insist on changes for ICE through the spending bill talks.

“This is obviously always the hardest budget, and Trump has made it a lot harder to land a deal given how lawless his agency is right now,” Murphy said. “We’re not going to fix all the problems in this budget, but we’re trying to find some common sense changes. We have a series of proposals on the table to get some accountability in that department.”

DeLauro also mentioned “a whole variety of suggestions,” including “masks” and “body cameras” have arisen during discussions.

“We’re trying to put together something that reins ICE in and [adds] guardrails, and at the same time, allows us to move forward with Coast Guard, TSA, FEMA,” DeLauro said Thursday.

Body cameras were something Amodei, a Republican, mentioned as a change that may come with “evolving from a Biden-era ICE to a Trump ICE.”

He predicted there would be language requiring agents to wear body cameras but admitted it is not finalized.

“We’re going to give them the money for it, and with the language that says, ‘This is what it’s for,’” Amodei added. “If this goes through, they’re not going to get the money, and we’ll go, ‘Gee, we wish you’ll use that for body cameras.’ It’ll be ‘That’s what it’s for.’”