The Senate Finally Passed a Bill to Fund Most of DHS — Except for ICE

The Senate early on Friday agreed to fund the vast majority of the Department of Homeland Security, bringing an end to the partial government shutdown that left most of its agencies without funding for more than a month.

Negotiators passed a bill to fund DHS through the end of the fiscal year after days of intense back-and-forth talks. Those discussions took on a new sense of urgency as hours-long security lines became a common occurrence at airports across the country. The bill will still need to pass the House and be signed into law.

The package does not fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the most hotly contested portion of the spending measure — and only funds a part of Customs and Border Protection. It also does not include any of the reforms to ICE that Democrats have sought dating back to January. Spurred by the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of immigration agents, Democrats said they would not vote for DHS funding without significant changes at the agency.

“Obviously, we’ll still have some work ahead of us, but the good news is we anticipated this a year ago,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters, noting that one of the reasons why they pre-loaded the party’s reconciliation bill last summer with ICE funding is because they anticipated issues on this front.

“I still think it’s unfortunate. The [Democrats] wanted reforms. We tried to work with them on reforms. They ended up getting no reforms,” he continued. “We’re going to have to fight some of those battles another day.”

The announcement came in the wee hours of Friday morning as staffers worked swiftly behind closed doors to write the bill late on Thursday. The bill passed by voice vote without any senators objecting.

Republicans earlier in the day declared that they had made their “last and final” offer to Democratic leaders, one that included language intended to win them over. Throughout much of the afternoon, Democrats stayed mum on the state of talks, including members who had previously been chief critics of the Republican offers.

Democrats came back with a counteroffer that once again included many nonstarters on the Republican side, leading the majority to go to Plan B: the bill that finally emerged and was passed without opposition.

The back-door battles also led President Donald Trump to announce earlier in the evening that he was authorizing funds, passed as part of last year’s reconciliation bill, to pay Transportation Security Administration agents.

That payment is expected to be a one-time action ahead of the Friday paychecks that were set to be missed. The spending bill still needs to advance through the House in the coming days.

“It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I want to thank our hardworking TSA Agents and also, ICE, for the incredible help they have given us at the Airports. I will not allow the Radical Left Democrats to hold our Country hostage any longer.”

A White House official added that the decision came after “a lengthy review process.”

“Air travel in America was at a breaking point and the president took decisive action in the face of a stalled Congress,” the official said.

There had been major questions of whether a deal was even possible hours beforehand, as the two sides remained at loggerheads over how to fund the department. Democrats had largely stuck to a list of 10 demands for any measure to fund DHS and ICE.

Chief among them were calls for ICE agents not to wear masks while involved in operations and for federal law enforcement officers to obtain judicial warrants rather than administrative ones before entering private property.

Republicans had considered both of those items to be red lines in talks, leaving them frustrated as Democrats continued to raise them as negotiations dragged on.

“I think there’s a lot of sense of urgency around getting TSA funded, but frankly, we’re not that far from where we’ve been for weeks, which is Democrats want real reforms to ICE and CBP and are resistant to funding them without reforms,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons told reporters after lunch on Thursday. “And Republicans would like us to fund them without reforms beyond what [the DHS secretary] committed to.”

“There is a real standoff,” he continued. “Trying to figure out exactly how to close that distance is gonna be the hard work of the rest of the day.”

The bill also does not include funding for Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, which Republicans had made a priority in recent days. HSI is tasked with investigating terrorism, cybercrime and human trafficking. The blueprint also does not include dollars for removal operations.

The bill now heads to the House, which could be in for a rare weekend session in order to process the package.

The Senate will now depart on a planned two-week recess: The pending break added another pressure point for members to strike a deal.

With ICE and parts of CBP funding axed from the bill, Republicans are expected to try to fund those as part of a second reconciliation bill in the coming months. Thune labeled that a “good possibility,” though the path to passing a reconciliation bill in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson only holds a tiny majority, is far from clear.

Budget reconciliation is a process that allows a party to pass key priorities with simple majority support so long as they have a direct fiscal impact.

“Democrats are trying to shut down ICE funding for the remainder of the fiscal year — ultimately they won’t be successful. In response, I’ll be pushing to lock in funding for deportation operations and salaries for a decade,” said Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, who met with Thune on Thursday night.

Any pending reconciliation bill could also include Republican priority measures in the SAVE America Act and Iran war funding.