Senate Democrats are once again threatening yet another partial government shutdown over funding the Department of Homeland Security following the shooting and death of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent as officers were in the midst of what the Department called a “targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault.”
Now, Democrats want to hold up $91.8 billion of funding for FY 2026 for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the Senate after it passed the House on a party-line vote.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he’s awaiting a “rewrite” of the DHS funding bill, urging Senate Republicans to just pass the remaining five bills up for consideration while holding up the DHS bill: “Senate Republicans must work with Democrats to advance the other five funding bills while we work to rewrite the DHS bill…”
The goal appears to be to separate DHS from any agreement on a funding package so that federal immigration enforcement efforts can be gutted later by adding a warrant requirement.
The goal is so that federal district courts can completely undermine all efforts at deportation — as if President Donald Trump wouldn’t just veto such a bill even if it managed to pass. Senate Democrats lack the votes to override anything.
For its part, the House has already finished all twelve appropriations bills, with the Senate has already adopting H.R. 6938, which funded Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment, which was signed into law by President Trump on Jan. 23.
Remaining is H.R. 7147 that funds DHS, H.R. 7006 funding the Department of Treasury, general government, national security and the Department of State and H.R. 7148 funding the Department of Defense (War), Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.
All told, that’s three minibuses and one stand-alone bill for DHS, making the latter the most vulnerable to a partial shutdown, particularly if Senate Republicans agree to fund the other parts of the government first.
To prevent any shutdown, then, instead, an agreement should be made on DHS first before proceeding to the remaining bills.
As it is, Democrats seem to want dust off Defund the Police and Defund ICE campaign mantras of 2020, which the American people reject.
All of this ignores that a warrant requirement for deportations may not have saved the lives of Renee Good or Alex Pretti. Good and Pretti were not illegal aliens, instead, they were citizens allegedly disrupting federal immigration enforcement efforts. Meaning, even if the agents had been executing warrants, that would not change the efforts by ICE Watch-like groups whose goal is to directly interfere with federal agents.
Do Democrats have some secret agreement with these agitators to “back down” when they get a warrant requirement into federal immigration law? That’d be interesting.
As it is, Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) appear to be betting that federal district courts will become the ones to tangle up every single attempted deportation by the Department of Homeland Security, setting the stage for mass denials of warrants — creating a new avenue for obstruction of the executive branch from enforcing federal immigration laws.
The idea is that DHS would never hit the streets to deport illegal aliens, because they’ll never get out of courts in the first place.
It is up to Senate Republicans to hold the line, fund the entire government and to hold back Democrats’ attempts to once again open the floodgates for unlimited illegal immigration when they get back in power. The only thing worse than no immigration laws might be unenforceable ones.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government.
