House GOP Rejects Senate DHS Funding Deal, Passes 60-Day Stopgap
House Republicans passed an eight-week measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security on Friday night, rejecting a separate deal that the Republican-led Senate passed earlier in the day.
Objective Facts
House lawmakers on Friday passed a Republican bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in its entirety for eight weeks, after GOP leaders rejected a Senate-passed bill that would exclude money for immigration enforcement. The tally was 213-203, with three centrist Democrats joining every voting Republican in supporting the bill: Reps. Don Davis (D-N.C.), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash) and Henry Cuellar (D-Texas). Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that the bill is "dead on arrival" in the upper chamber, as it would need some support from the minority Democrats to overcome a filibuster. The long DHS shutdown, which hit Day 42 on Friday, is destined for the record books.
Left-Leaning Perspective
Democrats repeatedly pointed out that, for all the outrage that House Republicans mustered against the Senate deal late Friday night, every GOP senator supported the agreement just hours earlier. With the House GOP refusing to put the Senate bill up for a vote, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., argued that House Republicans are the "only thing" standing between a deal. House Democrats robustly backed the Senate plan, which was similar to a partial DHS funding measure they have been pushing for weeks. Importantly for Democrats, the Senate bill does not include money for Border Patrol, which was a major sticking point in previous talks. (The Senate measure does include money for US customs operations.) Schumer said he was proud of Democrats who "held the line" on their objection to funding ICE and CBP without reforms. "Democrats held firm in our position that Donald Trump's rogue and deadly militia should not get more funding without serious reforms and we will continue to fight for those reforms," he said. For weeks, Democrats have refused to support funding for DHS after federal officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. The latest Senate package would have allowed Democrats in that chamber to fund operations like TSA, the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, while still pressing for additional guardrails on immigration enforcement officers. Democrats panned Johnson's description, noting that the Senate bill would have paid TSA and every other DHS subagency — just not the immigration enforcement operations at the center of controversy in Washington. "Speaker Johnson is calling this bipartisan agreement a joke simply because it doesn't give more money to Trump's out-of-control ICE agency," a Democrat said. The idea of sending a bill to an empty Senate chamber was not overlooked by House Democratic leaders, who accused Johnson of promoting a strategy that was designed to prolong the partial shutdown. "They know this is a continuation of the shutdown because the Senate is gone."
Right-Leaning Perspective
Conservative Republicans, led by the far-right Freedom Caucus, were successful in pushing GOP leaders to provide more funding to ICE and CBP. The conservative House Freedom Caucus came out against the Senate passed DHS funding bill, with Chair Andy Harris, R-Md., decrying the decision to advance the bill without money for ICE. "We can't believe that the Senate abdicated its responsibility this morning of not funding the child sex-trafficking investigation division of ICE, that they didn't fund the border patrol," he said. The partisan package was a nod to conservative immigration hawks, who hailed Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for pushing it through. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a statement that Democrats "remained intransigent and unreasonable" in their DHS funding demands. "Congressional Democrats have done real damage to the appropriations process by repeatedly forcing government shutdowns and refusing to fund entire agencies," Collins said. "Their refusal to fund ICE and Border Patrol leaves our borders and our country less secure and sets a precedent that they may one day come to regret." President Donald Trump was not happy with the Senate bill, saying any legislation on DHS spending needs to fund federal immigration enforcement. "In my opinion, you can't have a bill that's not going to fund ICE. You can't have a bill that's not going to fund any form of law enforcement, of which ICE is a big form, and so is Border Patrol." Privately, some GOP lawmakers and senior aides acknowledge they are pushing the party into even more treacherous political territory, with no clear plan to force Senate Democrats to accept their version of the bill and no certainty that Trump's maneuver to unilaterally pay Transportation Security Administration employees will work either. But others told CNN that there is so much anger within the House GOP that party leaders have no choice but to fight back against what they see as a massive win for Democrats.
Deep Dive
In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The shutdown stems from a six-week impasse over whether to fund immigration enforcement agencies without Democratic-demanded reforms. Democrats have demanded reforms after DHS personnel shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January in separate incidents. The Senate bill—passed unanimously in the early hours of Friday—excluded ICE and Customs and Border Protection funding but allowed other critical agencies like TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard to resume operations. This structure represented both a Democratic win (removing money from immigration enforcement) and a Republican concession (finally separating DHS funding from immigration). House conservatives, particularly the Freedom Caucus, viewed even this compromise as unacceptable. By Friday afternoon, Trump had publicly voiced frustration with the Senate-passed bill. "You can't have a bill that's not going to fund – in my opinion, you can't have a bill that's not going to fund ICE. You can't have a bill that's not going to fund any form of law enforcement, of which ICE is a big form, and so is Border Patrol," he told Fox News. Johnson's rejection of the Senate bill reflects genuine intra-Republican tension: Republicans voted en masse in favor of the House stopgap bill on Friday night, but the outward show of unity disguised underlying tensions within both the GOP conference and the party more broadly. Conservative Republicans, led by the far-right Freedom Caucus, were successful in pushing GOP leaders to provide more funding to ICE and CBP. But the decision to reject the Senate agreement stirred plenty of concern among more moderate GOP lawmakers, who now fear that Republicans are the clear owners of the shutdown in the eyes of voters. Democrats' framing overlooked that the Senate bill—crafted by Republican Majority Leader John Thune—passed with zero Democratic demands for policy reforms actually included; it simply withheld funding. Looking forward, Lawmakers in both chambers have left Washington for a two-week break for the spring holidays. Thune has the power to call back the upper chamber to vote on the House stopgap measure, but the prospects are unlikely. The belief among Senate Republican leadership is that it does not make sense to pursue a path other than the bipartisan bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, minus ICE and CBP, that the Senate passed early Friday morning. The impasse will likely extend through April, with only Trump's executive order on TSA pay providing temporary relief while the fundamental disagreement over immigration enforcement funding remains unresolved.