Body
House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced Wednesday that Republicans in Congress will pursue a plan aimed at ending the Department of Homeland Security shutdown that has stretched into a record-setting partial shutdown, after lawmakers left Washington last week without a fix.
In a joint statement, Johnson and Thune said Republicans would use “in the coming days” a two-track approach. The first track, they said, would return to a Senate plan to fund most of the department while leaving out U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol. The second track, they said, would later seek funding for those agencies through party-line spending legislation, a strategy they said could face opposition even from within the GOP rank-and-file.
Johnson and Thune framed the proposal as a do-over of the situation that led to the shutdown after the Senate passed a bipartisan DHS funding agreement through unanimous consent last Friday. The announcement said the Senate could approve that legislation again as soon as Thursday morning, but it remained unclear how quickly it could move through the House. The plan also projected a longer timeline for the second part of Trump’s approach—passing separate budgeting legislation to fund ICE and Border Patrol.
The announcement follows a rupture between the top House and Senate Republicans late last week, after Johnson rejected Thune’s plan. Instead, House Republicans rewrote the bill to fund all of DHS for 60 days, and the shutdown continued as members departed for a two-week recess, reaching its 47th day Wednesday.
Conservative House members signaled skepticism about any approach that does not fully fund the immigration and border enforcement agencies. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., posted on X that “caving to Democrats and not paying CBP and ICE is agreeing to defund Law Enforcement and leaving our borders wide open again,” adding, “If that’s the vote, I’m a NO.”
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Democratic unity helped produce the GOP’s new strategy, telling reporters, “for days, Republican divisions derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction.” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said the GOP should focus on fully funding parts of DHS that he said do not relate to “Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine,” and he linked the shutdown to pay and operational problems, including work at airports.
The shutdown has left many Homeland Security employees without pay, even as many continue to report for work. The disruption also fed into staffing shortages at the Transportation Security Administration, with AP reporting that more TSA agents called out from work and that airports saw frustrating security lines earlier, though those bottlenecks appeared to be clearing this week as agents began receiving backpay after an executive order from Trump.
Trump weighed in earlier Wednesday through a social media post calling on Republicans to fund the immigration portions of DHS through legislation that would not require Democratic support. He said he wanted the bill on his desk by June 1, adding in the post, “We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won’t be able to stop us,” AP reported.
Whether Johnson can secure enough support in the House to bring lawmakers back to Washington before their spring recess ends in mid-April remained uncertain. AP also reported that a narrow budget package being prepared for later this year is expected to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the remainder of Trump’s term, framed by Democrats’ objections to the president’s immigration enforcement agenda as a way to reduce the agencies’ risk of another funding lapse.