Defying Senate, House GOP Passes DHS Funding Stopgap

By Thérèse Boudreaux | The Center Square

(Worthy News) – The Department of Homeland Security shutdown will continue into the weekend after House Republicans snubbed the Senate’s funding deal and passed their own funding stopgap instead.

Rather than approve a dead-of-night compromise that Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., made with Senate Democrats right before the upper chamber left town, House leadership pushed a 60-day Continuing Resolution through the Rules committee and onto the House floor.

“The Senate’s bill was unconscionable. In the dead of night, they defunded Border Patrol and ICE — including the division that fights child sex trafficking — giving Democrats everything they wanted. That weak, pathetic surrender is unacceptable,” Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, posted on X after the House vote Friday night. “Senators need to get back to Washington immediately, do their jobs, and pass this bill.”

Senators, however, have already left for a two-week recess, which the House was also supposed to take.

House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., called the House’s decision “crazy.”

“House Republicans had the easiest possible path to put people first: vote for a bill that every Senate Republican voted for this morning,” Clark stated on the floor. “All they had to do was get out of the way – and they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”

Three House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass the CR, showcasing just how fatigued lawmakers are with yet another record-long shutdown.

Senate Democrats triggered the current shutdown on Feb. 13 by tanking the fiscal year 2026 Homeland Security bill and blocking it from passing the chamber ever since.

They gave Republicans a laundry list of new immigration enforcement restrictions and reforms to include in any annual funding bill that includes ICE and CBP funding.

Republicans and the White House spent weeks trying to find a compromise, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., made clear that all of Democrats’ demands must be met.

After 41 days, Thune and a handful of other Senate Republicans found a potential off-ramp: strip ICE and CBP funding – as well as any immigration enforcement reforms – from the Homeland Security bill entirely. Democrats agreed to that deal and the bill passed the chamber via voice vote.

Thune’s idea was for the House to pass the Senate’s funding deal, and then use another party-line budget reconciliation bill to give ICE and CBP their fiscal year 2026 money – minus the plethora of immigration enforcement reforms Democrats had demanded in the original Homeland Security bill.

Unlike other DHS agencies, ICE and CBP never needed funds from the Homeland Security bill to continue their operations. Both have simply dipped into the roughly $70 billion pots they each received last year from Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill.

DHS agencies like FEMA and Transportation Security Administration, however, had no backup funding and are currently operating understaffed and with unpaid employees.

President Donald Trump even signed an executive order Friday afternoon directing DHS and the Office of Management and Budget to pay TSA workers using “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations.”

House Republicans, of course, rejected Thune’s plan outright, ensuring that even if senators quickly returned to D.C. and approved the CR before Monday – an impossibility – the current shutdown will break all records for the longest in American history.

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