The US Senate on Friday was scrambling to find agreement on a government funding package as a partial shutdown loomed at midnight, after the killings of two US citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis upended spending talks and gave Democrats rare leverage over Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both US citizens shot dead in Minneapolis amid a surge of immigration enforcement agents, prompted Senate Democrats to block passage of a measure funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That jeopardized a broader legislative package intended to continue funding through September for a slew of government departments.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, has outlined a series of reforms to federal agents he wants codified in the DHS’s funding measure, including the requirement that officers wear body cameras, abide by a code of conduct and cease wearing masks and conducting “roving patrols” aimed at people they suspect of being illegally in the United States.
“These are not radical demands, they’re basic standards the American people already expect from law enforcement,” Schumer said on the Senate floor on Friday morning. “I hope we can get voting quickly here in the Senate today so we can move forward on the important work of reining in ICE.”
Schumer’s office announced on Thursday evening that a deal had been reached with Republicans to quickly pass through the Senate five spending bills that had bipartisan agreement and would continue the operations of departments including defense, labor, and health and human services through September. Funding for the DHS would be addressed with a stopgap measure lasting two weeks, which would allow time for negotiations over the Democrats’s demands for reforms to immigration enforcement.
However, the package needs approval by the House of Representatives, which is out of session and not scheduled to return until Monday – thus guaranteeing a partial shutdown beginning after midnight Friday and lasting at least through the weekend.
“The earliest floor action we could have is Monday, so we could inevitably be in a short shutdown situation,” the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, told USA Today. “But the House is going to do its job. We want to get the government funded, as does the president.”
The agreement had been expected to be put to a vote by the Senate on Thursday evening, but Republican Lindsey Graham reportedly held up the process of passing it unanimously, demanding the removal of a provision undoing the ability of lawmakers to sue the government if their phone call records were obtained by the FBI as part of its investigation into Trump’s 2020 election meddling.
A spokesperson for Graham did not respond to a request for comment.
Should the agreement hold, it represents an opportunity for Democrats to impose guardrails on Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which began immediately after he took office a year ago and has seen masked federal agents fan out to major cities nationwide.
The result has been hundreds of thousands of arrests and deportations, but also killings by ICE agents, detentions of US citizens, and complaints from local leaders and advocacy groups of brutal tactics by officers and violations of rights.
“We’re going to have to evaluate what the real opportunity is to get dramatic change at the Department of Homeland Security. It needs to be bold, it needs to be meaningful, and it needs to be transformative,” the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said on Friday.
But it has come together too late to prevent several federal government departments from closing their doors or curtailing services over the weekend and perhaps on Monday, the first business day when the shutdown will be in effect.
Should the spending deal pass the Senate, its reception in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives remains uncertain. The chamber had passed both the DHS bill and the five spending bills last week, with seven Democrats joining with the GOP to advance the latter despite calls that it be held up over Good’s killing.
However, several rightwing lawmakers have demanded that if the measures return to the chamber, they be coupled with legislation conservatives have demanded such as the Save Act, which would impose identification requirements to vote that critics say would disenfranchise swaths of Americans.
“EVERY SINGLE APPROPRIATIONS BILL THAT IS VOTED OUT OF THE HOUSE MUST HAVE THE SAVE ACT ATTACHED,” the Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna said Friday.
Their opposition could complicate passage of the spending measures, since Republicans control the chamber with 218 seats to the Democrats’ 213. Jeffries warned that Republicans will be blamed if their infighting prevents passage of the spending bills.
“The demands being made by far-right extremists in the House Republican conference are going nowhere, and if, for whatever reason, Speaker Johnson bends the knee to the far right, then Republicans are going to shut the government down,” he said.
Even if the government shuts down, it is unlikely to halt ICE’s deportation operations. The agency received $75bn from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year that it could use, and the Trump administration could also mandate that its employees continue working during a shutdown.
