Politics

DHS watchdog warns shutdown could imperil immigration enforcement oversight

Published

4 weeks ago

February 15, 2026

The partial government shutdown that went into effect Saturday is throwing the fate of oversight at the Department of Homeland Security into peril, with the department’s independent watchdog warning a lapse in funding could jeopardize several ongoing investigations.

DHS’s inspector general currently has eight active probes into the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown, including reviews of the use of facial recognition and allegations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents using excessive force.

But with a lapse in funding for DHS, the Office of the Inspector General has been forced to suspend approximately 85 percent of its audits, evaluations and inspections, according to the OIG.

Congressional Democrats are demanding sweeping reforms to ICE and Customs and Border Patrol before they’ll vote to fund DHS, including requirements that immigration enforcement agents wear body cameras and display their ID numbers and last names. With Senate Republicans and the White House refusing to budge on several key demands — including a proposed prohibition on federal agents wearing masks — the department is likely to remain unfunded for at least 10 days.

Democrats in Congress first asked Joseph Cuffari, the DHS inspector general President Donald Trump appointed during his first term, to investigate the use of force by ICE agents last June. The lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, wrote to Cuffari earlier this month asking him to expedite the probe, citing the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis as underscoring the “urgent need” for moving quickly.

Republicans have raised concern about the shutdown’s effect on DHS agencies like TSA and FEMA, although it will likely take weeks for the public to start feeling the effects of the funding lapse.

Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement that “OIG investigations provide transparency and accountability, and any delay in funding will only disrupt these important efforts,” adding that the DHS appropriations bill passed in the House provided “critical funding” for the office.

“As we experience yet another DHS shutdown because Senate Democrats refused to pass this legislation, I urge them to negotiate in good faith so we can ensure these resources and the resources for numerous other components, like FEMA and TSA, are not held hostage because of Washington’s dysfunction,” he said.

ICE, on the other hand, is largely insulated from the effects of the shutdown, with GOP lawmakers having appropriated billions of dollars for the agency in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.

But the lapse in funding raises several potential obstacles to the ability of members of Congress and investigators to conduct oversight of the agency. During the last government shutdown, ICE quietly furloughed most of its congressional relations team and blocked lawmakers from visiting immigration detention facilities. (Prior to the shutdown, Democratic lawmakers on several occasions clashed with DHS over their attempts to inspect detention facilities.)

And with approximately 60 percent of the OIG’s workforce furloughed — including auditors, data scientists and inspectors — only special agents like criminal investigators and personnel whose work is supported by secondary funding sources, like the Disaster Relief Fund, can continue working through the shutdown, per the office.

The effect of the funding lapse for the inspector general’s work is also slated to affect the office’s reviews of the Secret Service’s handling of the July 2024 assassination attempt against Trump, in addition to probes of DHS’s cybersecurity and counterintelligence operations.

The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency — an independent government entity that lays out annual legislative priorities focused on government oversight and accountability — has for years called on Congress to establish authority for IGs to continue oversight during government shutdowns.

Mark Greenblatt, who served as the Department of the Interior’s inspector general from 2019 until 2025, said while criminal investigations can sometimes continue despite a lapse in funding, IG offices are forced to pause oversight reviews, ceding valuable time on sensitive audits during shutdowns.

“These situations are raw. They need an independent voice providing facts on what’s happening on the ground with respect to these sensitive issues,” said Greenblatt, who was one of several IGs dismissed by Trump last year. “When they push the pause button on these things, they’re not delivering for the American people, and that, to me, is the problem.”

Democrats have accused DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of deliberately attempting to stymie the OIG’s ongoing probes. In a letter sent to Noem earlier this month, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) cautioned that “repeated tacit threats from your Office of the Secretary to DHS OIG may have already succeeded in weakening DHS OIG’s operational independence.”

That warning came after Duckworth met with Cuffari to discuss why her request for an independent investigation into use of force by federal agents during ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago was denied. During the meeting, she wrote in the letter, Duckworth learned that DHS’s general counsel advised the OIG on several occasions that Noem has the power to halt its investigations.

Cabinet secretaries are empowered by a 1978 law to prevent the OIG from carrying out audits or investigations if they determine the reviews could put national security at risk.

“This broad authority effectively empowers you to select from a broad range of pretextual options to unilaterally prevent or halt any ‘independent’ DHS OIG investigation, regardless of your true intent,” Duckworth wrote.

No DHS secretary has ever invoked the provision, Duckworth wrote in the letter.

Politics

Furious allies lobby Trump to keep deporting migrants

Published

7 hours ago

March 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal.

A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.

The new poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a pollster that Trump has used in all of his presidential elections, and shared exclusively with POLITICO. It found that 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrants who enter the country illegally. When asked if they support deporting all deportable migrants, not just violent criminals, a majority (58 percent) say they do.

Eighty-seven percent of Trump 2024 voters surveyed, including 79 percent of Hispanic Trump voters, want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“Overwhelmingly, Trump voters expect this from the administration. They don’t just support it, they expect it,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, which advocates for conservative immigration policy. “This is a good way to re-energize the base as we move into the midterms, the same way that Trump was able to do so in the lead up to the 2024 general election.”

The new coalition includes Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump; Erik Prince, a Trump ally and former Blackwater CEO; as well as a number of conservative think-tanks and lobbying groups close to the Trump administration including the Heritage Foundation, Federation for American Immigration Reform American Moment, and the Claremont Institute.

Morgan, who also served as chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under both former President Barack Obama and Trump, said a deportation strategy that involves targeting only violent criminals, gang members or terrorists for deportation is “a Clinton-Obama-Biden policy. And it’s historically been a disastrous failure.”

The campaign comes as other Republican strategists and lawmakers warn Trump’s mass deportation agenda is becoming increasingly unpopular following ICE operations in Minnesota that killed two U.S. citizens, and could hurt the party’s chances of retaining control of Congress.

Since then, the administration has pivoted its message on immigration enforcement while overhauling its leadership at DHS. Border czar Tom Homan replaced CBP chief Greg Bovino in Minneapolis and drew down the immigration enforcement presence there; the president ousted DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last week and tapped Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to replace her; and even Trump, in his State of the Union address, focused mostly on border security and deporting violent criminals.

On Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair instructed House Republicans to curb their hardline rhetoric and instead focus on removing violent criminals. Blair doubled down in a post on X, writing thatRepublicans are focused on “deporting the violent/criminal illegals that Joe Biden & the Democrats in Congress let in.”

Those comments angered members of the coalition, who say taking a “worst of the worst” approach to deportations is not a winning policy.

Still, the coalition’s poll results differ drastically from other recent polling on immigration: A January POLITICO poll found that nearly half of U.S. adults say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 of his 2024 voters. AFebruary NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that 65 percent of U.S. adults think Immigration and Customs Enforcements has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied that the White House has shifted its deportation approach.

“Nobody is changing the Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” Jackson said. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities. As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, approximately 70 percent of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records. Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately 3 million illegals have left the United States, either through forced deportation or self-deportation, with zero illegals coming through the most secure border in U.S. History for nine straight months.”

According to an internal DHS document obtained by CBS News, less than 14 percent of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year in office had violent criminal records.

Hispanic GOP lawmakers have recently lobbied DHS and the White House, expressing concern that the aggressive deportation approach could alienate the Hispanic voters that helped secure Trump’s victory in 2024. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) acknowledged those concerns Tuesday, telling reporters that there has been a “hiccup” with some Hispanic and other voters who view DHS’ approach as “overzealous.”

“Everybody can describe it differently, but here’s the good news,” Johnson added. “We’re in a course-correction mode right now.”

But the Mass Deportation Coalition is hoping its poll — which was commissioned by Chmielenski’s Immigration Accountability Project and conducted between Feb. 27 and March 3 — will course-correct that course correction. The online survey had a sample of 2,000 likely voters and a margin of error of 2.2 percent.

Chmielenski said he views the first year of Trump’s term as “phase one” of this deportation push, and now wants to see the administration enter “phase two”: by focusing on worksite raids, targeting any deportable individual and reaching 1 million removals in 2026. The Department of Homeland Security said it deported more than 600,000 individuals in 2025.

“Now that we’re a year into the administration, the public sentiment hasn’t changed,” Chmielenski said. “We still believe the Trump administration … has a mandate on mass deportations.”

Politics

Tillis says DOJ probe of Powell ‘reaching the point of the absurd’

Published

15 hours ago

March 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Tillis says DOJ probe of Powell ‘reaching the point of the absurd’

The North Carolina Republican said Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh “possesses impeccable credentials and a clear vision for maintaining the Fed’s independence…
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