Senators reported positive behind-the-scenes discussions Tuesday night as they returned to Washington in search of a way to end an impasse over Homeland Security funding that could trigger a partial government shutdown this weekend.
Without imminent signs of a breakthrough, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., started the legislative clock to get onto the underlying $1.3 trillion, six-bill spending package needed to avert another partial government shutdown when stopgap funding runs out Friday night. He filed cloture on the motion to proceed, which would “ripen” for a vote on Thursday barring a bipartisan deal to speed things up.
And there will likely have to be changes for the measure to hit the magic 60-votes target to advance past a filibuster, as Democrats have united against the DHS piece of the package in the wake of two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during a Trump administration immigration crackdown.
“Productive talks are ongoing,” Thune said Tuesday, while calling on Democrats to “continue their engagement and find a path forward that would avoid a needless shutdown.”
Democrats, outraged by the shootings, began calling for various restraints on the Homeland Security Department that many said need to be part of legislation to ensure compliance, rather than just actions the White House takes unilaterally.
Connecticut Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, top Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said in a video posted on social media Tuesday that his demands include requiring warrants for arrests, ensuring federal agents wear identification and body cameras, launching an independent investigation into the shootings, removing the Border Patrol from cities, and preventing DHS from entering “sensitive locations” like schools and churches.
“I’ve spent the entire weekend on the phone with colleagues from, you know, across the sort of ideological spectrum in the caucus, and I think we’ll get there,” Murphy said of his proposal. And he, like others, insisted that changes to DHS operations must be enshrined in legislation, as opposed to relying on administrative actions.
“You can’t trust anything, any promises this administration makes,” Murphy told reporters Tuesday. “It’s got to be in legislation. So there’s no way around that.”
Republicans have resisted making any legislative changes to the six-bill package, which also includes the Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, Financial Services, National Security-State, and Transportation-HUD bills. And they so far have rejected Democratic demands to strip out the Homeland Security bill from the package and give it a rewrite.
Sen. Mike Rounds, S.D., said Tuesday that bipartisan discussions about the path forward are gaining steam. “There’s lots of discussion going on, member to member,” he said.
“I think a lot of it will be offered to the president in terms of what might work, but I think there’s a real desire not to have a shutdown,” Rounds said. “There are some ideas out there that would get the vast majority of what’s out there all the way through and in law.”
One of the ideas being floated, Rounds said, includes a short-term stopgap bill for DHS, “just long enough to negotiate some things in there,” while passing the other five bills in the package.
However, the senator added, “Nothing happens, I don’t think, without the president being on board.”
Republican pushback
The Trump administration, for its part, has issued demands of its own for an immigration compromise.
The conditions include turning over all incarcerated undocumented immigrants, as well as those with active warrants, for deportation; the transfer of all undocumented immigrants arrested by state and local police; and state and local assistance for federal authorities in detaining undocumented immigrants wanted for crimes.
President Donald Trump also said Tuesday that the man killed in Minneapolis, intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti, wasn’t acting as an assassin, an accusation made by multiple senior members of his administration in the wake of the shooting.
But while calling the shooting “a very unfortunate incident,” Trump added, “He had a gun. I don’t like that. He had two fully loaded magazines.”
Republicans so far have mostly resisted changes to the bill, which would require the House to return to reconsider the legislation ahead of the Friday funding deadline — something House GOP leaders have expressed no interest in. That means even if the Senate reaches agreement on an amended bill, agencies still funded under the stopgap measure expiring Jan. 30 could again be partially shuttered, at least briefly.
Conservatives are firing warning shots against breaking off the DHS funding bill from the rest of the package.
In a letter to Trump shared Tuesday on social media, the hard-right House Freedom Caucus drew a red line against a funding package coming “back through the House without funding for the Department of Homeland Security.”
“It’s always a risky proposition if you have to send it back to the House,” Thune told reporters Tuesday, stressing the six-bill funding package is “very carefully constructed” and “got a big vote out of the House.”
However, the package was pieced together in the House after lawmakers considered the DHS funding bill separately from the other appropriations measures in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to the administration’s immigration and border policies.
The Homeland bill passed on a nearly party-line vote of 220-207, while the other combined bills secured much broader support, 341-88.
Scrutiny grows in both parties
Homeland Security is facing increased Republican scrutiny as recent polling shows falling approval of the president’s immigration agenda.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told reporters on Tuesday that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “should be out of a job” over her handling of the agency and tensions in Minnesota.
“It’s making the president look bad on policies that he won on,” Tillis said. “He won on a strong passage about immigration, and now nobody’s talking about that.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Ala., who voted for Noem’s confirmation, also said Tuesday she “would not support her again, and I think it probably was time for her to step down.”
Republicans in both chambers announced the heads of ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would testify before oversight committees. The planned hearings come as bipartisan calls grow for an investigation into the recent fatal shootings by federal law enforcement in Minnesota.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in a statement Tuesday that she has asked Noem to pause ICE operations in both her state and Minnesota, and that “they should be reviewed and far more targeted in their scope.”
Savannah Behrmann, Lia DeGroot, Sandhya Raman and John T. Bennett contributed to this report.
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