Now that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was successfully separated from all the other funding bills, the latter departments of which are now fully funded through Sept. 30, another partial government shutdown is underway as Senate Democrats again refuse to vote for the current measure, even as President Donald Trump once again taps One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds to keep immigration enforcement officers fully paid during the lapse of funding.
According the Department’s fall 2025 memorandum on a operations during a lapse of funding, employees with separate funding streams would still be paid: “The salaries of some DHS employees are funded from sources other than annual appropriated funds including fee revenue, multi-year, and no-year funds. To the extent that these sources have sufficient funds remaining in the account, activities and salaries funded from these sources can continue and are considered exempt. Employees whose regular salary and benefits are paid from a funding source that has not lapsed will continue to perform their normal duties and be paid during this federal funding hiatus.”
Instead, essential workers for the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Secret Service and other agencies will be the excepted workers who continue to work without pay during the shutdown, essentially as hostages for Democrats demanding policy concessions for judicial warrants for immigration enforcement, no more masking for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, a use of force standard and a bar on alleged racial profiling.
But as illustrated in the failed Feb. 12 vote to end debate on H.R. 7147 to fund the department for the rest of the year — 52 Republicans voted to advance the bill while 47 Democrats said no — Senate Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) simply lack the votes, the bipartisan majority, that is necessary to significantly alter the law.
Democrats can’t get to 60 votes to rewrite immigration laws, but even if they somehow could — for example by some sort of Republican revolt that simply is not happening right now — they couldn’t get to 67 votes in the Senate, and 288 votes thereabouts in the House based on 432 current members to reach the two-thirds threshold to override an all but guaranteed presidential veto.
That is why omnibus, minibus and other consolidated appropriations bills tend to be bipartisan, compiled at the committee level, and often stripped of poison pills in favor of keeping the government open. That’s the status quo entering any government shutdown and what usually emerges from the other end of a shutdown, that is, virtually nothing is achieved.
In 2025, Democrats wanted an extension of expanded Covid tax credits for insurance marketplaces, didn’t get it and settled on a promised vote on the measure that, because it lacked the votes, was never included in any proposal.
A 2018-2019 shutdown over funding President Trump’s border wall ended similarly, without the votes needed to pass a bipartisan funding bill, causing Trump to instead declare a national emergency and reprogram other defense spending funds to protect the southern border and construct the wall, and later in 2025, to instead include wall funding a budget reconciliation measure that did not require 60 votes to pass, and to wisely pay immigration enforcement ahead for multiple years as well.
A 2013 shutdown to defund Obamacare, as if then-President Barack Obama would have ever signed that, similarly ended without any significant policy concessions.
The most important aspect of this is the thing Democrats want to defund disarm, ICE and border protection, is fully funded. To get through the impasse, President Trump and Congressional Republicans will want to use the battle to shape a debate on deporting criminal illegal aliens, either wanted or convicted for crimes committed here or abroad.
In the meantime, polls suggest that voters want overwhelmingly criminal illegal aliens deported and for state and local governments to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, foreclosing any near-term popularity of these policies. The only way to make these policies popular would be to bring millions more to this country.
Democrats are endeavoring to create exceptions for all that including via sanctuary cities and states, by funneling pregnant women into Medicaid under the radar to have more anchor babies, but also by embedding the exceptions in federal law via “Phantom Zone” judicial reviews that will never let anyone to be deportable by overwhelming federal courts — as if that wouldn’t cause millions more to come in the future.
The fundamental goal is collapse our delicate two-party system into a Democratic one-party state like California, surrendering our unique political culture and rendering control of Congress and eventually the Electoral College to foreign control. Who wants to live in that “Bizarro World”?
They even want the foreigners to vote and get citizenship with it unclear whether they care which order that occurs in as Democrats inexplicably block the SAVE Act, the provisions of which — proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter identification to vote in elections — are overwhelmingly popular. Democrats’ goal is for unverifiable voting.
It’s all an unbelievable debate to even be having, and might only encourage the Trump administration to speed up deportations. Democrats don’t want to have a country anymore.
At this rate, Republicans might be tempted to just pass a 10-year budget for everything and just be done with it, fund their priorities and be done with the bipartisan charade. Or just abolish the filibuster and start doing partisan appropriations bills. Is that what Democrats want?
What is President Trump’s incentive to sit down with Democrats who want to bottle up all deportations to federal judges like U.S. District Judge James Boasberg and render our borders and immigration enforcement useless and catalyzing what would be the largest migration wave in human history (even worse than the Biden administration’s unprecedented 10.8 million border encounters most of whom were just let in).
Consider, just to basically protect America’s borders and have any immigration enforcement whatsoever now requires a partisan vote. If there is no bipartisan consensus on protecting this country and against unlimited immigration, then the bipartisan filibuster can no longer be sustained.
The upside of bipartisan funding bills and the current process is that the opposition party largely gets to ensure a more policy-neutral funding process that funds the essential parts of the government, including border protection and immigration enforcement, and still favors the majority at the end of the day (the opposition lacks the votes to impose its will) and in any event, give the two parties at least one thing to talk about every year and compile a bipartisan compromise, which is always the end result of every funding discussion.
So, for Senate Democrats, it’s either come and have that discussion, get some token use of force standard that won’t change a thing about officers’ ability to defend themselves, and let’s get back to work. The midterms are almost here, and whether Democrats win one or both houses (or neither) they’ll still have to contend with the fact that they cannot impose legislation without the votes to overcome a Senate filibuster and ultimately, to override the President’s veto. So, we can have a very similar discussion next year, too.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government.
