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Late last week, Senate Democrats’ weekslong blockade of Department of Homeland Security funding appeared to have finally drawn to a close — yet the partial shutdown continues. More on that below.
On Day 42 of their disruption, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer‘s (D-NY) caucus agreed to reopen most of the DHS, minus Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. They declared victory, congratulating themselves on presenting a united front. But what did they actually achieve?
Our Washington Examiner colleague Byron York correctly notes that “in the past, the party that attached conditions to re-opening the government, or parts of the government, lost the shutdown. Now, Democrats have gotten away with attaching conditions to re-opening the government, and Republicans have agreed to a deal funding most of DHS, but not its immigration enforcement and deportation operations.”
That’s true, and Democrats have established some recent precedents by embracing shutdowns that they may come to regret in the future — though perhaps they’ve calculated that Republicans would never “get away with” adopting this exact same approach because the “news” media would blitz them relentlessly for doing so. Democrats generally enjoyed “both sides” water-carrying coverage over the last several weeks.
York argues the GOP should never have negotiated at all with Democrats, who caused and sustained the shutdown by filibustering a bipartisan appropriations bill and attaching political conditions to lifting their obstruction.
“You don’t negotiate with people who are shutting down all or part of the government,” he writes. “The proper response to a threatened shutdown is: ‘Re-open the government, and then we’ll talk about your issue. But first the government has to be re-opened.’ That is always the public’s view. Instead, the GOP agreed to start talks. Once that happened, it legitimized the Democratic position of shutting down part of the government, in this case TSA, while demanding changes in immigration enforcement. Instead of seeing Democrats shutting down TSA over an unrelated policy dispute, the public saw two sides negotiating and unable to agree.”
Hence, the shared blame and muddied waters. These are strong points. But to repeat the question posed above, what did Senate Democrats actually accomplish with this?
They inflicted a shutdown of the DHS, during which four Islamic extremist attacks on the homeland occurred, countless American travelers were deeply inconvenienced, and legions of their supposedly beloved federal workers missed multiple paychecks. That’s a high-cost political maneuver. After well over a month of that chaos and insecurity, Senate Democrats voted for nearly all of the funding bill they’d been filibustering, while symbolically refusing to fund any border or immigration enforcement.
But ICE was operational and nearly entirely funded, with officers getting paid the whole time — unlike other shutdown victims such as TSA agents. That’s because Republicans wisely and presciently allocated extended ICE funding in last year’s working families tax cut law, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Democrats did not, and could not, defund ICE. And Republicans say they’ll again use the simple majority mechanism known as reconciliation to boost ICE and border funding this year, bypassing the filibuster. So the opposition party has loudly and disruptively employed legislative hostage-taking, a term they’ve applied to this very scenario in the past, to resist, defund, and reform ICE, but they’ve accomplished none of that, in reality.
Their list of “demands” on changing ICE’s operating policies has gone entirely unfulfilled. If they’d agreed to an earlier compromise, some alterations could have been enshrined in law, even if their poison pill requirements were always nonstarters. But they didn’t, so zero changes were made — at least for now. Is this what “winning” looks like?
The ordeal still isn’t over. The plot thickened on Friday, as House Republicans rejected the Senate bill, instead approving a two-month “clean” continuing resolution that would maintain existing DHS funding levels. A handful of Democrats joined the Republicans for passage. Upper chamber Democrats, like the vast majority of their lower chamber colleagues, instantly rejected this stopgap measure out of hand, as they’d already turned down numerous opportunities to greenlight bipartisan DHS packages over the course of their shutdown. It therefore drags on. The Senate is on recess, so the shutdown mess appears likely to churn forward in the coming weeks, with each chamber having passed a bill that cannot advance in the other.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a stalwart conservative, told my radio audience on Friday that while he’s sympathetic with the House’s latest action, it’s imperative to recognize that Democrats are not going to budge, so the Senate bill, quickly supplemented by a “rocket docket” reconciliation bill to fill the opposition-caused funding gaps, is the only viable path forward. If he’s right and it ultimately comes to that, the GOP majorities must follow through on this reconciliation promise. It’s now quite clear that a Congress controlled partially or entirely by Democrats, a distinct probability starting next year, will seek to starve or cripple federal immigration enforcement. Funding these agencies is a priority, given that Democrats are digging in as a fanatically anti-enforcement political force.
This reality was underscored last week in an exchange on Fox News’s The Will Cain Show. Cain sparred with Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), who complained that passing the bipartisan DHS funding bill would have maintained “funding mechanisms that would allow ICE to continue to deport people.” Cain interjected, “That’s its job! Deporting illegal immigrants is the job of ICE.” Crow then launched into a short diatribe about alleged ICE abuses in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Some of his claims were debatable and exaggerated, painting the vast agency in the worst possible light. Setting aside any mistakes or abuses, real or imagined, ICE performs vital work on a vast scale. That work has been made all the more urgent by Democrats’ open border fiasco throughout the Biden administration.
Democrats often struggle to identify any deportations they’d support, while aggressively objecting to deportations of illegal immigrants with criminal records, final (post-due process) deportation orders lodged against them, or both. They are, effectively or explicitly, an anti-enforcement party. Many of their elected officials, and much of their base, demand the abolition or defunding of ICE altogether. Crow objected to funding that would “allow ICE to continue to deport people,” which, as Cain pointed out, is literally ICE’s function.
That’s what radicalized Democrats actually have a problem with. This is their new “defund the police” crusade. If they were focused on narrow instances of malfeasance, they could have pursued bipartisan reforms. They instead defunded the DHS for 42 days, insisted on changes that would have crushed the agency’s ability to do its core job, and are shouting about defunding and abolition.
It would be reckless and extreme to shut down or strip funding from the police because a small handful of officers allegedly acted in corrupt, problematic, or lawless ways. But that’s the posture Democrats have adopted regarding America’s federal immigration enforcement agency — not because of controversial incidents, but because they fundamentally oppose ICE’s underlying mission. As radical and harmful as Democrats’ immigration policies were under the Biden administration, what they’re morphing into is somehow even more destructive.
