Fifty Days and a Promise
Republicans ran on securing the border. They won the White House and both chambers of Congress on the strength of that argument. Fifty days into the longest partial DHS shutdown in American history, they are now debating a plan that funds the TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard — but deliberately excludes ICE and Border Patrol. Speaker Mike Johnson announced on April 1 that Republican leadership would pursue a "two-track" approach: pass a clean DHS funding bill (without immigration enforcement provisions) to end the shutdown optics, then use the budget reconciliation process to fund ICE and Customs and Border Protection separately by June 1 [1]. The Senate passed its version unanimously on April 2. The House returns April 13. And then the real fight begins.
To be clear about what this means: the agencies most central to conservative immigration policy — the ones Republicans have championed, defended, and pledged to expand — are the ones being left out of the current funding deal. The rest of the Department of Homeland Security gets funded through September. ICE and Border Patrol get a legislative I.O.U. and a June 1 deadline. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who has been one of the sharper critics of Johnson's approach, put it plainly: this is defunding law enforcement. He's not wrong about the mechanism, even if you disagree about the strategy [2].
