Under pressure from Senate, House caves on DHS funding bill without immigration enforcement

WASHINGTON (CN) — House Republicans on Wednesday backed down from their opposition to a Senate-passed bill to partially fund the Department of Homeland Security without any budget for certain immigration enforcement activities.

The move to fund DHS using the bipartisan spending bill represented a major concession to Senate Republicans by their colleagues in the House, who over the weekend roundly rejected the upper chamber’s deal with Democrats that set the budget for most agency programs except U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a joint statement Wednesday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans would fund DHS “on two parallel tracks,” employing both the regular appropriations process and budget reconciliation to ensure the agency fully reopens. The Senate Budget Committee, led by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, has begun drafting such a budget resolution, the party leaders said.

Under the Senate-passed plan, approved unanimously last month by both Republicans and Democrats, most DHS programs will receive funding through the budget bill now facing a vote in the House. Appropriations for ICE and Border Patrol will be handled later through budget reconciliation, a process that will not require any Democratic support.

The Republican-led effort would fully fund immigration enforcement programs through the end of the Trump administration, said Thune and Johnson.

“In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the department, make sure all federal workers are paid and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law enforcement activities can continue uninhibited,” the statement read.

Homeland Security has been shut down since late February, after Democrats refused to fund the agency without a slate of major reforms to ICE and Border Patrol operations.

After weeks of impasse that saw U.S. air travel ground to a halt and hundreds of federal workers go without pay, things seemed to be on the right track late last month after the Senate approved its compromise measure funding the lion’s share of DHS programs through September while leaving off budget for certain immigration enforcement activities. But that plan proved intolerable to House Republicans who slammed the deal as a “joke” without funding for ICE.

The lower chamber over the weekend rejected the Senate-passed measure, opting instead to move an eight-week continuing resolution that fully funded DHS.

But Wednesday’s announcement appears to be an about-face for Johnson and House Republicans and a win for the Senate. The joint statement, however, affirmed that the GOP would seek to fund immigration enforcement programs without any Democratic input — and without any of the reforms they’d demanded.

“We operated under a belief that while our country is in the midst of an international armed conflict, Democrats might finally come to their senses and understand that defunding our homeland security agencies is beyond reckless and very dangerous,” said Thune and Johnson, alluding to President Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

The Republicans said they’d hoped Democrats would accept the House’s stopgap budget — unquestionably a political nonstarter for the minority party — but that it was “abundantly clear that Democrats place allegiance to their radical left-wing base above all else.”

“That is not acceptable to Republicans in Congress, nor is it to the American people,” said Thune and Johnson. “We cannot allow Democrats to any longer put the safety of the American public at risk through their open border policies, so we are taking that off the table.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took a victory lap Wednesday in response to the Republican DHS funding plan, claiming that Democrats had successfully forced House Republicans to take up the upper chamber’s compromise measure.

“Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered,” the New York Democrat said in a statement. “We were clear from the start: fund critical security, protect Americans and no blank check for reckless ICE and Border Patrol enforcement. We were united, held the line and refused to let Republican chaos win.”

Though House Republicans have apparently agreed to consider a DHS funding bill without some ICE budget, Congress will likely pass a spending plan for immigration enforcement without the reforms Democrats forced an agency shutdown in hopes of securing. Lawmakers had said they would not support any DHS budget without changes to ICE uniform standards, enforcement practices and use of judicial warrants to forcibly enter homes, among other things.

As of Wednesday afternoon, it was unclear when the House might return to vote on the Senate-passed DHS funding bill. Both chambers of Congress are out of Washington this week for a scheduled recess.

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