Last week, the top Republican leaders on Capitol Hill released a joint statement — quite possibly having been told in no uncertain terms by the White House that the internecine fighting and finger-pointing over an unresolved Department of Homeland Security funding fight needed to cease immediately.
The new agreement was greeted with consternation among many rank-and-file House Republicans, who are livid at the Senate for unanimously waving through a bill that funds most of the homeland security apparatus, excluding Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After the upper chamber did so and then left town, the House GOP responded by passing a two-month stopgap funding bill that didn’t exclude immigration enforcement. Then it also left town.
Incompatible, competing pieces of legislation left the problem festering, while members flew home. This was a bad look for Republicans, who nominally control both houses of Congress, even though Democrats had been responsible for causing and sustaining the shutdown for a month and a half.
Amid the dysfunction, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) published a statement together, effectively backing the Senate’s plan, apparently with the president’s support.
“In the coming days, Republicans in the Senate and House will be following through on the President’s directive by fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security on two parallel tracks: through the appropriations process and through the reconciliation process,” they wrote.
In other words, the House would adopt the Senate appropriations bill, likely with Democratic help, given widespread GOP frustration, then add more funding for immigration enforcement, much of which is currently funded under last year’s working families tax cut law, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. That’s hardly a surefire proposition, of course, and President Donald Trump has said he wants that on his desk by June 1 — an ambitious timetable.
“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 joint Thune and Johnson statement reads.
In a parting shot at the opposition, Thune and Johnson added, “Democrats will once again demonstrate to the American people their support for open borders and keeping criminal illegal immigrants in America.” This may sound like partisan demonization, but it’s demonstrably true.
By seeking to defund ICE and Border Patrol, Democrats have made clear that they are an anti-enforcement political party that has, if anything, moved even further left on immigration since losing the 2024 election. Many elected Democrats are on the record in favor of stripping funding from and abolishing ICE. Others claim they simply want to achieve “reforms” to ICE operations, though some of those proposed changes would endanger federal law enforcement officers, who have already faced a huge spike in violent attacks and doxing, while crippling the agency’s ability to do its job. Other alterations had more bipartisan buy-in, but none of them were adopted in the DHS funding bill. Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin posted on X, wondering what, exactly, Democrats have accomplished with their protracted shutdown.
“The reason Democrats started what is now the longest shutdown in DHS history is because they were demanding dramatic reforms to the way ICE operates. They now get zero of those reforms after negotiations fell apart in the Senate. None. Dems are claiming victory because Republicans are now agreeing to a DHS funding bill with zero dollars for ICE and CBP and Dems can message to their base that they held the line and didn’t fund Trump’s mass deportation agenda,” Melugin wrote, continuing, “but ICE and CBP are already pre-funded (not entirely) by the One Big Beautiful Bill, immigration enforcement operations have continued without issue, and Republicans plan to give ICE and CBP even more money in a second reconciliation bill, which will require no Democratic votes in the Senate.”
Melguin concluded, “So what did this DHS shutdown accomplish, other than hurt a lot of people and create chaos at airports?” He actually answered his own question in this post. Claiming victory for a fanatically anti-enforcement and anti-Trump base was the entire purpose of this shutdown — with the side benefit for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) of staving off the wrath of his leftist fringe, which wants to strip him of his leadership title and primary him in his next electoral cycle.
The pain was the point. Democrats got to show “resistance” and “fight,” correctly calculating that the “news” media would help them deflect blame by applying a vastly different standard than they have when Republicans forced previous impasses. Four domestic jihadist attacks, painful airport wait times, and unpaid federal workers — it feels like an eternity since Democrats’ stunt du jour was performatively “standing with our federal workers” to resist Department of Government Efficiency reforms — didn’t make them budge an inch.
And what they gained was a talking point to feed their base, without actually preventing or reforming ICE operations one iota. Schumer himself essentially admitted as much in a CNN interview, bragging that “we held it up because we wanted, as I mentioned before, to reform ICE and CBP” — the “we” being Senate Democrats, and the “it” being DHS funding. So much for the preposterous “GOP shutdown!” spin.
And the reforms he cites never came to fruition, including those that could have realistically attracted Republican support. Democrats have temporarily removed enforcement funding from the spending “baseline,” but without altering or reforming fully funded enforcement itself, for the foreseeable future. This was all a costly, harmful, fruitless show.
Or as Democrats are framing it, “victory.”