House Republicans have rejected legislation, passed by the Senate, that would finance most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but withhold funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The move imperils efforts to end a 42‑day partial government shutdown that has seen thousands of DHS employees miss paychecks and furious travelers miss flights due to long airport security lines.
Mike Johnson, the GOP House speaker, said Friday that his party will instead put forward a short‑term funding bill to keep DHS running through 22 May. He told reporters he hopes to take a vote on the stopgap measure in the House, where his party holds a razor thin majority, and send it to the Senate “as soon as possible”.
After a two‑hour conference call with his Republican colleagues, Johnson blasted the package the Senate sent to the House.
“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” he said. “I’m quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill.”
He added that it was “unconscionable” for Democrats “to force some sort of negotiation at three o’clock in the morning and try to hoist this upon the American people”.
Johnson also noted that he spoke with Donald Trump before addressing reporters. “He understands what we’re doing and why, and he supports it,” the House speaker said.
The announcement comes as Johnson struggles to keep his fractured party together, after many conservative hardliners in the lower chamber said the Senate bill – which lawmakers advanced in a rare overnight session ahead of Congress’s scheduled two-week recess – was a non-starter. .
Republican representative Chip Roy, a member on the influential House rules committee, called the predawn breakthrough on Capitol Hill “laughably bad” and insisted that his colleagues would be “rejecting it out of hand”.
“It is absolutely offensive to the people that we represent that the Senate would send over a bill that doesn’t fund border patrol and the core components of ICE,” Roy told reporters. He also said that members will push to attach several concessions to advance Trump’s agenda – including voter identification.
The Senate-passed measure would have funded the DHS subagencies affected by the lapse in funding which has lasted almost six weeks, such as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the US Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa).
House GOP leaders’ decision to reject the agreement sets up a clash with the Senate and will force lawmakers – many of whom have already left Washington – to return from their break to vote on the House’s continuing resolution.
That proposal is unlikely to draw any Democratic support. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has already declared it “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber, making it all but impossible to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster.
Congress has been deadlocked for two months over broader DHS funding. Democrats, for their part, have demanded stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement, in the wake of the fatal shootings of two US citizens during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
Senate Republicans ultimately conceded to an 11th-hour deal that Democrats have been pushing for weeks – reopening only the affected agencies and omitting funding for ICE and border patrol.
The bill passed earlier lacks many of the key reforms that Democrats had been pushing for – like the need to obtain judicial warrants when entering private property and for officers to no longer wear masks. Nevertheless, Schumer heralded the deal as a victory for his party.
“Democrats held firm in our opposition that Donald Trump’s rogue and deadly militia should not get more funding without serious reforms, and we will continue to fight for those reforms,” he said.
Since ICE received $75bn through the president’s sweeping policy bill last year, it has been largely insulated from the funding lapse hitting the rest of DHS and has continued operating.
That contrast has sharpened as TSA workers go weeks without pay.
Acting TSA chief Ha Nguyen McNeill said this week that some officers are sleeping in cars or selling plasma, and that 40% have stopped reporting to work. The White House said nearly 500 officers have quit since last month.
In response, Trump signed an executive order instructing DHS to immediately pay 60,000 airport security workers, declaring an “unprecedented emergency situation” and again blaming Democrats for their “reckless decision to prioritize criminal illegal aliens over American citizens” for the ongoing shutdown.
The push for ICE funding hasn’t slowed, with Senate Republicans vowing to move federal immigration enforcement money – along with funding for the administration’s Iran campaign and parts of the Save America Act – through reconciliation, which requires only a simple Senate majority.
Late Thursday, Republican Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Senate budget committee, said that he will “proceed quickly and efficiently” to ensure “ICE and other vital functions of homeland security, as well as the US military and efforts to increase voter integrity, are Democrat-resistance proof”.
