The Department of Homeland Security has now been without funding for three days, and nobody in Washington appears to be in a rush to fix it.
The partial shutdown began at 12:01 a.m. on February 14 after Senate Democrats stripped DHS funding from a broader spending package and passed the other five appropriations bills without it. Lawmakers then left Washington for recess and are not scheduled to return until February 23, leaving tens of thousands of DHS employees working without pay and no floor votes on the horizon.
The standoff is rooted in the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Renee Nicole Good was killed by an ICE agent on January 7, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a VA hospital, was shot and killed by CBP agents during a protest on January 24. The killings set off nationwide protests and gave Senate Democrats the political leverage to demand sweeping changes to how ICE and CBP operate before they would agree to fund the department.
What Democrats Want and Why Republicans Won’t Give It
Democrats released a set of 10 demands that include requiring agents to wear visible identification, get judicial warrants before entering private property, and stop wearing masks during operations. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been blunt about the party’s position. “The path forward is simple,” he told reporters. “Negotiate serious guardrails that protect Americans, that rein in ICE, and stop the violence.”
Republicans reject the premise entirely. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole called the shutdown Democratic “obstruction” and argued that the real victims are the DHS employees caught in the middle. “This is all politics,” Cole said. “There’s no serious policy issue here they’re trying to achieve, or going to achieve this way.”
He went further during a hearing on the shutdown’s impact: “The things they want to shut down aren’t going to shut down. ICE is fully funded. The Border Patrol is fully funded. What they’re doing is hurting TSA agents, hurting air traffic controllers that would get a pay raise, keeping men and women from the Coast Guard from getting paid, making sure we can’t fully fund FEMA.”
Cole has a point on the funding math. Both ICE and CBP still have access to roughly $75 billion approved last year through Trump’s reconciliation package, meaning the agencies at the very center of this fight are largely unaffected by the shutdown. The employees getting hurt are at TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA, the Secret Service, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
White House border czar Tom Homan, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, said the administration would not accept Democrats’ demand that agents unmask during operations. “I don’t like the masks, either,” Homan said. “But these men and women have to protect themselves.” He added that he was not directly involved in the funding negotiations but took issue with several of the Democrats’ conditions.
The Vote That Started It All
The shutdown’s trigger was a February 12 cloture vote in the Senate. The final tally was 52 to 47, well short of the 60 votes needed to advance debate on the House-passed DHS appropriations bill. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the only Democrat to cross party lines and vote yes, consistent with his longstanding position of voting against government shutdowns regardless of the circumstances.
On the Republican side, seven senators also voted no: Rand Paul, Ted Budd, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Ashley Moody, Rick Scott, and Tommy Tuberville. Senate Majority Leader John Thune voted against the measure for procedural reasons, preserving his ability to bring it back to the floor later.
Rather than let the entire government funding process collapse over the DHS dispute, the Senate passed the remaining five appropriations bills and deliberately carved out homeland security spending. Sen. Patty Murray, the senior Democratic appropriations negotiator, framed the move as a way to force new negotiations over ICE and CBP oversight. A joint Republican statement from the Appropriations and Homeland Security committees placed full blame on Democrats for putting TSA screening, Coast Guard patrols, and FEMA disaster response at risk.
Who Is Actually Getting Hurt
More than 90% of DHS’s 272,000 employees will keep working through the shutdown, but many of them won’t see a paycheck until Congress acts. TSA alone has roughly 61,000 employees staffing more than 430 commercial airports across the country. Their next payday is March 3, and depending on how long the shutdown lasts, they could see reduced checks or miss payments entirely by March 17.
Coast Guard personnel, Secret Service agents, and FEMA staff face the same situation. About 8% of the department’s total workforce will be furloughed outright, with non-essential projects, training programs, and procurement contracts put on hold.
Cole acknowledged the toll on workers directly during his hearing remarks: “We should make sure that men and women that we have already put in a terrible position once for 43 days don’t have to go through it again.” This is the department’s second funding lapse in a matter of months.
What Happens Next
For the TSA officers, Coast Guard members, and other DHS employees showing up to work without pay this week, the political calculations matter a lot less than the practical ones. On February 17, Senate Democrats sent a counteroffer to the White House, though details of the proposal have not been made public. A senior White House official said Democrats rejected the administration’s latest counterproposal, calling a “particularly challenging aspect” their demand to end arrests without judicial warrants. Schumer threw cold water on the administration’s earlier offer, calling it “not serious.”
With Congress out of session until February 23, any deal would still need to clear procedural hurdles in the Senate and potentially require a fresh vote in the House. Both parties appear to be calculating that the other side will absorb more political damage the longer this goes on. A recent NBC News poll found that approval of Trump’s handling of border security and immigration dropped to 40%, down from 51% last June, which may explain why Democrats feel comfortable holding their position.
