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It took 43 days for enough pain to build to force Democrats to end last fall’s government shutdown. The ramifications of the current partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security will be subtler, which may ultimately mean less pressure on the minority party to relent.
Democrats sent Republicans and the White House an immigration enforcement counteroffer late Monday night, though there’s still no strong momentum for a deal. While the entire dispute is over immigration enforcement, those operations can still continue unabated with funding from last year’s tax law.
“If [Democrats] want to suffer the fallout from interruption with [the Transportation Security Administration] and [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and those things, that seems like a bad choice, but it’s their choice,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. It’s “futility if they think that somehow continuing to resist funding of DHS is going to affect immigration enforcement.”
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These circumstances have top GOP officials bracing for a protracted funding lapse. White House officials even say they’ll have more enforcement flexibility during a shutdown than they would under the now-abandoned bipartisan funding agreement. That would seem to drive some urgency among Democrats, but many are not in a compromising mood to provide more dollars to immigration enforcement.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says his party is ready to cut a deal on Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding — on Democrats’ terms, of course — and fund the whole department. However, some rank-and-file Democrats are still floating the idea of funding everything except ICE and Customs and Border Protection, arguing those agencies are already funded and should be isolated from other key government functions.
“I support separating FEMA and TSA and the Coast Guard, and I support clawing back all the seven years of funding that were given to ICE in the Big Beautiful Bill,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.
Key government officials from departments like TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA will start missing paychecks in the coming weeks unless the Trump administration once again tries to shift money around. There’s some precedent for this situation: The 2018-19 shutdown ended as TSA workers started calling in sick en masse, degrading travel for millions of Americans. But it took about a month to have real teeth.
“The only thing the shutdown does is keep TSA agents from being paid. And it keeps the [ICE] guardrails that we already negotiated from going into effect,” said Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.