DHS funding proposal falls flat as Democrats, conservatives and Trump raise doubts

Key negotiators circulated a potential deal Tuesday to end a five-week standoff over Department of Homeland Security funding and, among other things, pay beleaguered transportation screeners as mounting security lines snarl airports.

Nobody in Washington, however, seems too excited about it.

The framework brokered by a handful of Senate Republicans and the White House Monday got a cool reception from Senate Democrats, who said it does nothing to rein in immigration enforcement abuses at the center of the DHS funding impasse.

Conservative Republicans pushed back on the idea that some Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds would be left out of the agreement and pursued separately under the party-line reconciliation process, calling it a capitulation to Democrats.

Even President Donald Trump, who has gone back and forth on the DHS shutdown talks but hosted the White House meeting Monday evening where the latest proposal was hatched, gave the plan only a tepid endorsement in his first public comments on it Tuesday.

“We’re going to take a good hard look at it,” he said in the Oval Office, later adding, “They are getting fairly close. But I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”

The griping heard up and down Pennsylvania Avenue cast fresh doubt on whether Congress would be able to act this week to end the shutdown that started Feb. 14 — even as hourslong waits at some U.S. airports weighed heavily on lawmakers.

The Republican proposal would forgo about $5.5 billion in funding for Enforcement and Removal Operations under ICE, in lieu of agreeing to a series of constraints Democrats want to impose on DHS enforcement personnel.

Key Democrats rejected that tradeoff Tuesday. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, said the new GOP offer “contains no reforms” beyond what both sides had already agreed to in January before DHS agents fatally shot two American citizens in Minnesota. “That’s not acceptable,” she added.

Republicans had hoped to isolate the point of greatest contention, the conduct of DHS agents carrying out Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda, while funding the rest of the sprawling department. But GOP leaders said they would not put fetters on agents whose salaries were not being funded under the bill.

“A lot of the reforms are contingent on funding for ICE,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “So if you're not going to have funding, I don't know how all of a sudden now they can demand reforms.”

ICE received $75 billion in last summer’s GOP megabill, leaving it largely immune from the funding lapse that has crippled other parts of DHS.

“The problem is that they have everybody at DHS right now doing immigration enforcement,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who is the top Democrat on the Homeland Security funding panel but not central to the negotiations.

By funding other DHS agencies, Murphy added, “you're providing money for immigration enforcement.”

The qualms are not just coming from Democrats.

Conservatives are strategizing behind the scenes to kill the framework because it leaves out ICE funding in the uncertain hope of passing it through reconciliation, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the private effort.

Some Republicans expect their right-flank colleagues to try to lobby Trump to tank the deal or demand changes, two of the people said. Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed as much late Tuesday, telling reporters that House Republicans were "very resistant” to breaking up ICE funding in the DHS bill.

A White House spokesperson gave the emerging plan only a lukewarm blessing Tuesday before Trump made his public comments. The president made clear he remains more invested in passing a partisan elections bill, the SAVE America Act, than cutting a deal to end the DHS shutdown.

The framework would pair the leftover $5.5 billion in ICE funding with some provisions of the SAVE America Act, though the strictures of the reconciliation process would severely limit the GOP’s options.

“I want to support Republicans,” Trump said. “Sometimes it’s awfully hard to get votes when you have Democrats that don’t want to have voter ID, they don’t want to have proof of citizenship, they don’t want to do anything about men playing in women’s sports.”

Ultraconservatives in the House are also assembling to oppose the proposal negotiated by GOP senators, warning their leaders against going around them to pass the agreement. Johnson could make such a move using fast-track procedures if he had the necessary support from a critical mass of Republicans and Democrats to vault a two-thirds-majority threshold.

And there is a significant swath of the House GOP, including mainstream leadership allies, who consider the idea of not fully funding ICE a nonstarter.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats will offer a counterproposal to the GOP offer.

“I can assure you it will contain significant reform in it,” Schumer told reporters Tuesday. Thune, Tuesday night, expressed doubts Democrats could offer anything Republicans would agree to: "I just don't know what that is at this point,” he said.

“We're not negotiating over funding ICE, and they still want all the other stuff that they were demanding,” Thune continued, adding, “We'll see what comes back, but my sense is that it's probably not going to be anything we can agree to.”

But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries backed Schumer’s play Tuesday evening, crediting Senate Democrats for rejecting “what was an insufficient offer presented to us as it relates to getting ICE under control.”

Murray, who has been meeting with White House officials, lamented that negotiations have been a moving target.

“It is awfully hard to find common ground with Republicans when it’s not clear that they have common ground amongst themselves,” she said Tuesday. “The only way we are going to get out of this mess is if we know that the president is on the same page as the Republicans.”

Top Republican senators are anxious to reach an accord to end the shutdown before the House and Senate are scheduled to adjourn later this week for a recess stretching into mid-April.

“We’re ready to go, OK? We’re ready,” North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, a senior Republican appropriator, said Tuesday as he left Thune’s office. “So the Democrats need to join us now and get it done. I mean, we've bent over backward negotiating with them.”

The House is expected to vote for the third time on a full DHS funding bill later this week, without the carveouts from the Senate GOP proposal. Democratic leaders are whipping their members in opposition, according to two people granted anonymity to share private party strategy.

Instead, Democrats on both sides of the Capitol continue to pressure Republicans to pass Democratic proposals to fund all of DHS except ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the secretary’s office, as well as policies cracking down on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

“We have a solution to this issue. We can deal with ICE and CBP. That conversation should be ongoing,” Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, said in an interview Tuesday night. “In the meantime, let us fund these other agencies.”

DeLauro, who offered a bill more than a month ago to that end, noted that the offer Senate Republicans sketched out Tuesday was hatched in consultation with Trump but not Democrats.

“That's a discussion between Republicans,” she said. “There's no Democratic inclusion in any of that discussion. And anything that doesn't include reforms of ICE and CBP is not viable.”

Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, Myah Ward, Riley Rogerson, and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.