The US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a funding measure that will end the partial government shutdown, while giving Democrats time to negotiate with the White House and Congress’s Republican leaders over restrictions on Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The Republican-controlled chamber approved the $1.2tn appropriations measure by a 217-214 vote, with all but 21 Republicans voting in favor and all but 21 Democrats against. Trump is expected to sign it, ending the shutdown that began after midnight last Friday, which halted many operations at departments including defense, health and human services, labor and transportation.
The funding lapse occurred after Democrats refused to approve continued funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) following the killings by federal agents of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis amid the Trump administration’s surge of immigration enforcement in the city.
Democrats have demanded a host of guardrails be imposed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies involved in Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Among their conditions is the requirement that federal agents wear body cameras and cease wearing masks, follow a code of conduct and obtain arrest warrants for people in the country illegally.
“What Democrats want is exceedingly commonsense,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said in a floor speech earlier on Tuesday.
Democrats initially blocked passage of the spending package in the Senate last week, prompting the White House to agree to a deal by which the DHS would be funded for two weeks while the rest of the departments would have spending authorized through September, when the 2026 fiscal year ends.
In a statement released after the vote, the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said the changes his party was demanding “must be part of any full-year appropriations bill” for the DHS.
“Americans from every corner of the country are demanding accountability and an end to the lawless, paramilitary tactics that ICE is using in our communities. Absent bold and meaningful change, there is no credible path forward with respect to the Department of Homeland Security funding bill next week,” Jeffries said.
The prospects for a bipartisan agreement on agents’ conduct remain unclear. On Monday, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced all federal agents in Minneapolis will immediately begin wearing body cameras, with plans to expand their usage nationwide.
However, Schumer argued, the policy was not good enough to assuage Democrats’ outrage over the killings in Minnesota’s largest city, as well as allegations of brutal tactics and racial profiling of US citizens by ICE agents.
“And why just Minneapolis? This policy, which is the right policy, should be nationwide. There’s no reason to delay that,” Schumer said.
“Most importantly, executive actions alone will never be enough for the American people. We need to pass legislation. We know how whimsical Donald Trump is. He’ll say one thing one day and retract it the next.”
The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, a close ally of Trump, has come out against two of Democrats’ demands, saying at a Tuesday press conference he opposed requiring federal agents to obtain arrests warrants.
“Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant, an additional warrant, to go and apprehend people who we know are here illegally. How much time would that take? We don’t have enough judges. We don’t have enough time,” the speaker said.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Johnson said that Democrats’ demands that ICE agents stop wearing masks and have identification visible “would create further danger”, and said he did not think Trump would support it.
