Congress passes DHS funding bill that leaves ICE and Border Patrol without a dime

The House on Thursday approved a funding package that restores money to most of the Department of Homeland Security, but deliberately zeroes out funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, ending a record 76-day partial shutdown while leaving the two agencies most responsible for enforcing immigration law completely in the cold.

The House cleared the measure by voice vote, picking up a bill the Senate had already passed more than a month earlier. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the legislation, which fully funds the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, FEMA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency through the end of the fiscal year. Breitbart reported that congressional Republicans now plan to fund ICE and Border Patrol separately through a reconciliation bill worth tens of billions of dollars.

Read that again: Congress just passed a Homeland Security spending bill that funds everything except the agencies that secure the homeland's borders and enforce its immigration laws. The bill includes language that specifically zeroes out money for ICE, a detail that has infuriated House Republicans who see it as a political trap.

A forced hand and a looming recess

Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team made the decision to move forward in a private meeting earlier Thursday. CNN, as cited in the reporting, described a leadership group that felt it had "little choice", the House was preparing to leave for a week-long recess, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin had been warning publicly that his department was nearly out of money.

Mullin, a former House member, laid out the math in stark terms. As the New York Post reported, the DHS secretary told Fox News:

"My payroll through DHS is just over $1.6 billion every two weeks, so the money is going extremely fast, and once that happens, there is no emergency funds after that."

That pressure, combined with a White House memo warning that exhausted funding would "unleash havoc on air travel" and leave Secret Service agents and Coast Guard personnel without paychecks, Fox News reported, forced the issue. Johnson reversed his earlier resistance and brought the Senate-passed bill to the floor.

Speaker Johnson framed the move as a practical necessity. As the Washington Times reported, Johnson said:

"Everybody gets their paychecks now and will get them moving forward."

That is true as far as it goes. Coast Guard members, TSA screeners, and FEMA staff will see their pay restored. But the men and women who patrol the southern border and arrest criminal illegal immigrants? Their funding remains unresolved.

Republicans smell a trap

Many House Republicans understood exactly what was happening, and said so. The bill's language zeroing out ICE funding hands Democrats a ready-made attack ad: "Republicans voted for a bill that defunded ICE." It does not matter that Republicans plan to fund ICE through reconciliation. The vote is on the record.

Johnson privately tried to tweak that language but ran into resistance from Senate GOP spending leaders, CNN reported. The result was a bill that forced House Republicans to choose between keeping DHS employees paid and handing their future primary opponents a weapon. That is not governing. That is a hostage exchange.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas did not mince words ahead of the vote:

"I think it's asinine that we're funding the government this way."

Roy's frustration reflects a broader dysfunction. Congress has had months to pass a clean appropriations bill. Instead, DHS operated under a record-breaking shutdown, 76 days without regular funding, while lawmakers argued over process, filibuster rules, and reconciliation strategy. The people who paid the price were the frontline employees who kept showing up to work without knowing when their next paycheck would arrive.

That pattern of congressional inaction has become a recurring theme. Recent absences from House votes have only compounded the difficulty of managing a razor-thin majority, and the DHS funding fight exposed every crack in the coalition.

The reconciliation gamble

The Republican plan now rests on reconciliation, the budget procedure that allows the Senate to pass spending legislation with just 51 votes, bypassing the 60-vote filibuster threshold. The goal, as reported across multiple outlets, is to fund ICE and Border Patrol to the tune of tens of billions of dollars on purely partisan lines.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida made the case bluntly:

"The Senate is more concerned about preserving the filibuster than they are about preserving the Constitution. The filibuster is not in the Constitution. The appropriations bills are."

He has a point. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power of the purse. Yet the Senate's procedural attachment to the filibuster has repeatedly blocked straightforward appropriations. The result is a patchwork of continuing resolutions, shutdowns, and now a reconciliation workaround that was never designed for routine agency funding.

The Washington Times reported that House Republicans adopted a budget resolution to begin the reconciliation process, with legislation due by May 15 and a potential price tag of up to $75 billion for ICE and Customs and Border Protection funding. If successful, the reconciliation bill would fund these agencies for the remainder of President Trump's term, a far more aggressive timeline than the typical annual appropriations cycle.

Speaker Johnson has shown a willingness to move quickly when the political pressure demands it. Whether the Senate can hold 51 Republican votes for a reconciliation package of that size remains an open question.

What the bill actually does, and doesn't do

The legislation signed into law funds the Coast Guard, TSA, Secret Service, FEMA, CISA, and other DHS components that do not handle immigration and border enforcement. Just The News confirmed that the bill covers these agencies through the end of the fiscal year in September.

What it does not do is equally significant. ICE and the border security functions of Customs and Border Protection received zero dollars in this package. The Washington Times noted that these agencies remained operational during the shutdown through a separate funding stream, but that stream was running dry, which is what forced the issue.

Rep. Zach Nunn of Iowa captured the mood of members who voted yes despite their frustrations:

"This should have been done a long time ago. I want to see a resolution today to make sure these guys are paid."

Nunn's comment points to the real cost of the 76-day standoff. Every day the shutdown continued, DHS employees, many of them in law enforcement and emergency response, worked without the certainty of regular pay. These are not political abstractions. They are people with mortgages and families who serve the public while Congress plays procedural chess.

The broader pattern of party-line procedural fights in the Senate has made ordinary governance increasingly difficult, and the DHS shutdown is the most visible casualty to date.

The real question Congress left unanswered

The bill is a stopgap dressed up as a solution. It ends the shutdown headline. It gets paychecks flowing to non-immigration DHS staff. And it punts the hardest question, whether Congress will actually fund the agencies that enforce immigration law, to a reconciliation process that has not yet produced a single line of legislative text.

Democrats have no incentive to help. If reconciliation stalls or the Senate cannot hold its 51 votes, ICE and Border Patrol remain unfunded through normal appropriations. The bill Congress just passed does not fix that. It codifies it.

Meanwhile, the political incentives cut the wrong way. Senate Republicans who blocked changes to the bill's ICE-zeroing language protected the filibuster at the expense of their House colleagues' political safety. House Republicans who voted yes can now be accused of defunding ICE, an accusation that is technically accurate, even if the intent was the opposite. And Democrats get to watch the GOP fight itself while the border agencies that enforce laws Democrats oppose go without dedicated funding.

The broader question of how Congress wields its institutional power, and whether it can do so competently, hangs over every aspect of this episode.

Congress ended a shutdown by funding everything except the parts of DHS that actually enforce the border. If that counts as a win, the bar for governing has dropped somewhere below the floor.