With an end to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown in sight, House Republicans on Friday bristled at the deal their Senate colleagues sent them overnight, potentially imperiling the funding bill and threatening to extend the shutdown that’s led to worsening airport delays.
The Senate early Friday morning advanced a bill to fund most of DHS, except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection, in a move to end the partial government shutdown that has disrupted air travel across the U.S., as Transportation Security Administration agents go without paychecks and miss work.
That bill immediately met resistance in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La, on Friday afternoon confirmed a plan to ditch the Senate proposal and instead try to pass a stopgap funding bill for all of DHS through May 22.
The stopgap measures advanced out of the House Rules Committee on Friday, teeing up a vote as soon as later this evening.
“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” Johnson told reporters. “The Senate Democrats have foisted upon this appropriations process their radical, crazy agenda. They want to reopen the borders and they want to stop the deportation of dangerous, criminal illegal aliens.”
Any such effort would need to go back to the Senate for final approval and would extend the shutdown.
It is also not likely to pass in the Senate, where most lawmakers have already left town. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Friday called the proposal “dead on arrival.”
“We’ve been clear from Day One: Democrats will fund critical Homeland Security functions — but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Schumer posted to X.
A move by President Donald Trump to pay TSA agents during the shutdown may lessen urgency for Congress to act fast. According to a DHS statement posted to X on Friday, TSA agents could start seeing payments as soon as Monday, giving Republicans some breathing room to continue negotiating.
“President Trump has already ordered that TSA agents will be paid, and that machinery is in process right now,” Johnson said. “We will reduce the lines and the waits at the airlines. We’ll make sure that those who are protecting us are paid.”
Schumer and other Democrats view the version of the bill that advanced out of the Senate largely as a win.
After weeks of Republicans fighting Democrats on their calls to remove funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement from any potential deal, the Senate bill does exactly that, though it does not include the changes to ICE’s immigration enforcement practices that Democrats had demanded.
Those immigration enforcement cuts raised the hackles of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Talking with reporters at the Capitol, Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who chairs the group, said they would only support a version of the bill that adds back ICE and CBP funding, plus a federal voter identification requirement, a key component of an unrelated bill that Trump and his congressional allies had tied to DHS funding.
“The only thing we’re going to support is adding that funding into the bill, adding that voter ID, sending it back to the Senate, make them come back and do their work,” Harris said.
House Democrats, meanwhile, expressed general support.
“The only thing standing between ending this chaos or not are House Republicans,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters. “There’s a bipartisan bill that emerged from the Senate with uniform support, and it should be brought to the floor immediately.”
Senators had scrambled much of the week to strike a deal before the recess scheduled to start on Friday, but as talks broke down late Thursday, Trump intervened and announced via Truth Social that he would pay TSA agents via executive order.
The shutdown began in February in the weeks after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis as part of a federal immigration crackdown. Democrats demanded changes in ICE and DHS more broadly and refused to fund the department.
Friday’s vote in the Senate was a step toward ending that impasse, though it was far from a kumbaya moment.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a statement that Democrats “remained intransigent and unreasonable” in their DHS funding demands.
“Congressional Democrats have done real damage to the appropriations process by repeatedly forcing government shutdowns and refusing to fund entire agencies,” Collins said. “Their refusal to fund ICE and Border Patrol leaves our borders and our country less secure and sets a precedent that they may one day come to regret.”
Republicans have vowed to restore funding to ICE via a second party-line legislative package using the Senate “budget reconciliation” procedure they used to pass last year’s tax and spending bill. Republicans’ next measure with ICE funding may also include a grab bag of other issues, including defense funding and the SAVE America Act, a Trump-backed voter ID and noncitizen voting bill that has captivated the right flank of the GOP in recent months.
“This bill will focus on ensuring ICE and other vital functions of homeland security, as well as the U.S. military and efforts to increase voter integrity, are Democrat-resistance proof,” Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a post to X on Thursday.
Budget reconciliation is a procedural tool that requires only a simple majority to pass — as opposed to the 60 votes usually required to overcome a filibuster in the Senate — provided its components have some spending or revenue impact.
— Dan Mangan and Karen Sloan contributed to this report.