The government shutdown is ending. But the fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security is far from over.
President Donald Trump signed a package of funding bills on Tuesday afternoon that will end the four-day partial government shutdown.
It’s still not clear how DHS will be funded in the long run.
Funding for the department runs out on Friday, February 13, and Republicans have yet to agree to changes to immigration enforcement that Democrats are demanding in exchange for supporting the funding.
Without an agreement, several government agencies will go unfunded, and if no bill to fund DHS passes for a long time, workers could miss paychecks.
It would also affect other agencies funded by the DHS bill, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Coast Guard.
However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection would be impacted less than other agencies. Republicans voted to give $75 billion for ICE and roughly $65 billion for CBP in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in July.
What Democrats are demanding
In the wake of Pretti’s killing, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out three key demands on ICE:
- Ending roving patrols and tightening arrest warrant rules;
- More accountability measures for ICE, including independent investigations;
- Adding body cameras and removing masks from ICE officers.
In a Tuesday statement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries backed up those points, while also calling for an “end to the storming of sensitive locations like houses of worship, schools, and hospitals.”
It’s not yet clear whether Republicans will agree to any of those demands, leaving open the possibility that Democrats won’t support a future DHS funding bill.
While that may not be an issue in the GOP-controlled House, it would allow Democrats to block the bill in the Senate, where Republicans hold 53 seats but 60 votes are required to advance most bills.
How we got to this point
The partial shutdown began on Friday, after Senate Democrats demanded changes to funding for DHS in the wake of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
The House had already passed a package of spending bills that funded DHS, along with the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and other agencies.
Senators came together and agreed to negotiate changes, passing a new version of the spending package that extends DHS funding for only two weeks in order to give time for negotiations.
But that bill still had to clear the House again, and with the lower chamber not scheduled to come back into session until this week, funding for those agencies ran out at midnight on Friday.
This shutdown was only partial, affecting fewer parts of the federal government than the 43-day long shutdown that occurred in the fall.
That’s because lawmakers have already passed bills to fund various parts of the government, including the departments that fund SNAP and WIC payments.
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