Congress
DHS funding proposal falls flat as Democrats, conservatives and Trump raise doubts
Key negotiators circulated a potential deal Tuesday to end a five-week standoff over Department of Homeland Security funding and, among other things, pay beleaguered transportation screeners as mounting security lines snarl airports.
Nobody in Washington, however, seems too excited about it.
The framework brokered by a handful of Senate Republicans and the White House Monday got a cool reception from Senate Democrats, who said it does nothing to rein in immigration enforcement abuses at the center of the DHS funding impasse.
Conservative Republicans pushed back on the idea that some Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds would be left out of the agreement and pursued separately under the party-line reconciliation process, calling it a capitulation to Democrats.
Even President Donald Trump, who has gone back and forth on the DHS shutdown talks but hosted the White House meeting Monday evening where the latest proposal was hatched, gave the plan only a tepid endorsement in his first public comments on it Tuesday.
“We’re going to take a good hard look at it,” he said in the Oval Office, later adding, “They are getting fairly close. But I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”
The griping heard up and down Pennsylvania Avenue cast fresh doubt on whether Congress would be able to act this week to end the shutdown that started Feb. 14 — even as hourslong waits at some U.S. airports weighed heavily on lawmakers.
The Republican proposal would forgo about $5.5 billion in funding for Enforcement and Removal Operations under ICE, in lieu of agreeing to a series of constraints Democrats want to impose on DHS enforcement personnel.
Key Democrats rejected that tradeoff Tuesday. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, said the new GOP offer “contains no reforms to ICE or Border Patrol” and “that’s not acceptable.”
Republicans had hoped to isolate the point of greatest contention, the conduct of DHS agents carrying out Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda, while funding the rest of the sprawling department. But GOP leaders said they would not put fetters on agents whose salaries were not being funded under the bill.
“A lot of the reforms are contingent on funding for ICE,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “So if you’re not going to have funding, I don’t know how all of a sudden now they can demand reforms.”
ICE received $75 billion in last summer’s GOP megabill, leaving it largely immune from the funding lapse that has crippled other parts of DHS.
“The problem is that they have everybody at DHS right now doing immigration enforcement,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who is the top Democrat on the Homeland Security funding panel but not central to the negotiations.
By funding other DHS agencies, Murphy added, “you’re providing money for immigration enforcement.”
The qualms are not just coming from Democrats.
Conservatives are strategizing behind the scenes to kill the framework because it leaves out ICE funding in the uncertain hope of passing it through reconciliation, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the private effort.
Some Republicans expect their right-flank colleagues to try to lobby Trump to tank the deal or demand changes, two of the people said.
A White House spokesperson gave the emerging plan only a lukewarm blessing Tuesday before Trump made his public comments. The president made clear he remains more invested in passing a partisan elections bill, the SAVE America Act, than cutting a deal to end the DHS shutdown.
The framework would pair the leftover $5.5 billion in ICE funding with some provisions of the SAVE America Act, though the strictures of the reconciliation process would severely limit the GOP’s options.
“I want to support Republicans,” Trump said. “Sometimes it’s awfully hard to get votes when you have Democrats that don’t want to have voter ID, they don’t want to have proof of citizenship, they don’t want to do anything about men playing in women’s sports.”
Ultraconservatives in the House are also assembling to oppose the proposal negotiated by GOP senators, warning their leaders against going around them to pass the agreement. Speaker Mike Johnson could make such a move using fast-track procedures if he had the necessary support from a critical mass of Republicans and Democrats to vault a two-thirds-majority threshold.
And there is a significant swath of the House GOP, including mainstream leadership allies, who consider the idea of not fully funding ICE a nonstarter.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats will offer a counterproposal to the GOP offer. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is expected to meet with Schumer Tuesday and gather with his caucus Wednesday morning before the offer is delivered.
“I can assure you it will contain significant reform in it,” Schumer told reporters Tuesday.
Murray, who has been meeting with White House officials, lamented that negotiations have been a moving target.
“It is awfully hard to find common ground with Republicans when it’s not clear that they have common ground amongst themselves,” she said Tuesday. “The only way we are going to get out of this mess is if we know that the president is on the same page as the Republicans.”
Top Republican senators are anxious to reach an accord to end the shutdown before the House and Senate are scheduled to adjourn later this week for a recess stretching into mid-April.
“We’re ready to go, OK? We’re ready,” North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, a senior Republican appropriator, said Tuesday as he left Thune’s office. “So the Democrats need to join us now and get it done. I mean, we’ve bent over backward negotiating with them.”
Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats have submitted their latest proposal for pairing Department of Homeland Security funding with immigration enforcement policy changes.
“Democrats sent Republicans our counteroffer on legislation to reopen DHS, pay TSA workers, while at the same time rein in ICE with commonsense guardrails,” Schumer said, adding that the offer “contains some of the very same asks Democrats have been talking about now for months” on changes to immigration enforcement tactics.
Schumer met with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Wednesday to discuss the funding stalemate.
President Donald Trump called on Congress Wednesday to quickly extend a key surveillance program amid a Republican rebellion that is threatening to tank the effort ahead of an April 20 deadline.
“When used properly, [the program] is an effective tool to keep Americans safe,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Wednesday. “For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension.”
He emphasized that restrictions included in the last reauthorization of the Section 702 spy program should remain in place. Trump also argued that the ongoing war against Iran should lead Congress to act quickly given the program, which allows intelligence agencies to monitor communications abroad without a warrant, is “extremely important to our Military.”
“With the ongoing successful Military activities against the Terrorist Iranian Regime, it is more important than ever that we remain vigilant, PROTECT our Homeland, Troops, and Diplomats stationed abroad, and maintain our ability to quickly stop bad actors seeking to cause harm to our People and our Country,” Trump said.
Blue Light News previously reported that the White House had privately communicated Trump’s support for a straight extension to key congressional leaders.
Speaker Mike Johnson pushed House Republican hard-liners who want new restrictions against domestic surveillance to back the extension Trump wants, including in a closed-door House GOP meeting Wednesday morning. Several Republicans still raised concerns about the “clean” reauthorization plan, including Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia.
President Donald Trump maintained government documents relevant to his business interests after he left office, according to an internal memo from former special counsel Jack Smith’s office.
The memo, viewed by Blue Light News, was transmitted by the Justice Department to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees earlier this month. It was turned over in response to Republican-led probes into the investigations Smith led during the Biden administration surrounding Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office, as well as his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
“Process is very much ongoing but the FBI has already since found both — that classified documents were commingled with documents created after Trump left office and that there are classified documents that would be pertinent to certain business interests,” stated the memo, dated Jan. 13, 2023.
The second volume of Smith’s report on his team’s investigative findings, which centers around the classified documents case, is currently under a court-ordered seal. Democrats have been pushing for DOJ to release it in hopes that it could reveal damaging information about the president. New information about Trump’s conduct, unearthed in this memo, could only heighten the pressure on the administration to make the full report public.
It also could inform questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is due to invite Smith to testify in a public hearing on his Trump investigations in the coming months.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, alleged in a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi dated Tuesday that the memo suggests Trump “may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
Raskin also alleged that the DOJ appeared to have violated the judicial order compelling the seal of the second volume of Smith’s report in handing over some materials to Congress, including grand jury material.
A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement Wednesday, rejected Raskin’s claims and called his move a “political stunt.”
The spokesperson said that it was unsurprising that Smith’s “files contain salacious and untrue claims about President Trump,” and the files handed over to Congress did not violate the court order, nor did they disclose relevant grand jury material.
“We understand that Jamie Raskin, much like Jack Smith, is blinded by hatred of President Trump,” the spokesperson wrote. “However, he needs to get his facts straight — this Department of Justice is the most transparent in history in part because of our efforts to expose the weaponization of the Biden administration in full compliance with the law and the court.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, also in a statement maintained that Trump “did nothing wrong” and called Raskin’s actions “pathetic.”
A spokesperson for House Judiciary Democrats pointed to the irony in the Trump administration claiming to be “the most transparent in history” when it was refusing to release Smith’s findings.
“Another day, another manufactured outrage from the left,” a spokesperson for House Judiciary Republicans countered.
The 2023 memo transmitted to Congress also stated that Trump maintained documents that were so sensitive that only few had access to them beyond the president, and the fact that he had materials relevant to his business interests suggested “a motive for retaining them.”
“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them,” Raskin wrote in his letter to Bondi. “It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them.”
Gregory Svirnovskiy contributed to this report.
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