By Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom
WASHINGTON — U.S. senators showed no movement Wednesday toward a deal to end the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, despite the problems it’s causing for the thousands of federal workers set to miss yet another paycheck and travelers waiting hours to get through airport security lines.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said an offer from Democrats, sent over in the morning, was completely unacceptable and that GOP lawmakers wouldn’t even bother to send back a counterproposal.
“They know better. They’re asking for things that have already been turned down,” he said. “So it just seems like they’re going in circles.”
Thune said the chamber would vote later on a funding bill for DHS that doesn’t include Enforcement and Removal Operations at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the deportation and detention arm of the agency.
“They said over the weekend that they didn’t want to fund ERO. They’ll fund everything else,” he said. “So we’re going to give an opportunity to vote to do that.”
Thune said Republicans’ decision to remove funding for those deportation programs represents a “significant” compromise that shows GOP lawmakers are “coming to the table and trying to get a deal.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the offer Democrats sent over represented “a reasonable, good-faith proposal that contains some of the very same asks Democrats have been talking about now for months.”
Schumer said a proposal Republicans sent earlier this week didn’t include any of the overhauls to immigration enforcement that Democrats have been talking about since January, when federal officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
“For Republicans to send us a proposal that has no reforms is bad faith as well and will only slow things down,” he said.
President Donald Trump remains a wild card in the negotiations. His support will be needed for any DHS funding bill to become law, regardless of how much longer it takes lawmakers to reach consensus.
“Well, I don’t want to comment until I see the deal,” he said Tuesday when asked about ongoing DHS talks. “But as you know, they’re negotiating a deal. I guess they’re getting fairly close. But I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., when asked about those comments during a Wednesday morning press conference, appeared skeptical of breaking off some line items in the DHS funding bill.
Any legislation to end the shutdown that passes the Senate will need to move through the House before it could reach Trump’s desk.
“We always have Homeland funded as an entire department. There’s obvious reasons for that. It’s very important. I don’t think we need to be breaking it apart,” he said. “And so I think that’s what the president is reflecting there. He wants Congress to do its dang job.”
It isn’t clear whether the Senate will still depart for its two-week spring break without a bipartisan agreement to fund DHS, which has been shut down since Feb. 14.
Legislation cannot advance in that chamber without the support of at least 60 senators, making buy-in from each party essential to end the shutdown.
Thune said he hadn’t made a final decision but seemed likely to let lawmakers head back home for the scheduled recess absent progress toward a deal.
“If we’re not here, and when the Democrats are willing to make a deal, we’d certainly get everybody back to vote on it,” he said. “But no decisions on that yet. So hopefully the next couple days will be productive.”
Until a deal is reached, the DHS funding lapse will continue to affect workers and programs run by many of the agencies within the department, including the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration.
ICE and Customs and Border Protection operations have largely continued uninterrupted since Republicans approved tens of billions in additional funding for those agencies in their “big, beautiful” law.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford said lawmakers need to find some sort of solution to fund DHS following weeks of stalemate.
“At the end of the day, we got to get them open,” he said. “And the frustration that we have is we literally offered what they asked for three days ago, and then suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh no, no, we got new stuff.’”
Lankford said he doesn’t want to see senators leave for the recess without a deal to reopen DHS.
North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said lawmakers should stick around Capitol Hill until they solve at least some of the several outstanding issues.
“We’ve got a lot of plate spinning. And I’m afraid if we leave until we get some certainty around them, a few of them are going to fall to the floor and people are going to be wondering what’s going on,” he said.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said the way the Trump administration has approached immigration enforcement and deportation has led to the problems over DHS funding.
“I have a constitutional responsibility to fund only a government that obeys the law,” he said. “I would be violating my oath of office to fund ICE without reforms.”
Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno went to the floor in the evening to ask unanimous consent to approve a bill that would fund every component of DHS for two weeks, providing back pay to all of its employees.
Moreno said that would give senators enough time to work out a bipartisan deal on the full-year DHS spending bill if they canceled the recess and stayed around to work.
Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley proposed that lawmakers instead fund TSA through the end of September, when the current fiscal year ends.
Moreno then asked Merkley to change that request to fund every agency within DHS except for Enforcement and Removal Operations for the rest of the fiscal year.
Merkley then said he would agree to fund every agency within DHS except ICE and CBP.
“He keeps asking for Customs and Border Protection to be funded without modifying how they’re behaving across the nation,” Merkley said. “He keeps asking for ICE to be funded without modifying their actions where they’re acting like a secret police.”
The senators were unable to come to an agreement to approve funding for any of the agencies at DHS for any length of time during a nearly hour-long exchange that became tense at several points.
Moreno said the impasse represented “a sad day for the United States Senate.”
Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.
