DHS deal in limbo as Democrats demand tougher ICE crackdown despite GOP compromise
Senate Democrats rejected Republicans’ latest offer to reopen Homeland Security, despite the deal giving them much of what they asked for.
Senate Republicans crafted a framework to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after meeting with President Donald Trump earlier in the week that would carve out immigration enforcement funding and include some reforms to immigration operations.
It mirrors a similar proposal that Democrats tried to advance on the Senate floor twice during the shutdown, which entered its 39th day on Wednesday. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Democrats aren’t satisfied with the latest offer, which is still being finalized.
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"Negotiations are ongoing, and they've sent us an offer," Schumer said. "And we'll be sending them an offer back. And I can assure you it will contain significant reform in it."
But by Wednesday morning, Senate Democrats had yet to send an offer to Republicans.
After meeting with Trump and hoping that they had a workable deal, Republicans are now frustrated that Democrats are balking.
"We finally just said, ‘Stop. We'll just fund everything but [Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)],’" Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Fox News Digital. "That's what you said you wanted at the beginning. Let's do that."
"That's what we're doing," he continued. "So no extra language, no extra playing with it. We're doing just the baseline. We don't like it. They don't like it. It opens everything up and gets everybody funded again."
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Republicans’ framework also hit a snag on Tuesday when Trump acknowledged that the GOP was getting "fairly close, but I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it."
Democrats still want stringent reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) baked into any deal and have shut down previous offers from the White House that addressed most of their main concerns, minus requiring judicial warrants for DHS agents and unmasking.
"If we are talking about funding any part of ICE or [Customs and Border Protection], we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said. "The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that."
The latest chapter in the ongoing back-and-forth comes after negotiations between both sides appeared dead in the water, but reignited last week.
Republicans were hopeful that after finally getting Democrats into a room, they could break through the logjam and reopen the agency as thousands of federal workers go without pay, lines at airports produce staggering delays, and worries about attacks on the homeland increase.
That shifted over the weekend when Trump demanded that the GOP combine DHS funding with the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which had a chilling effect on the talks between Democrats and Republicans.
Now, despite concessions on ICE funding, Democrats say funding for that portion of DHS wasn’t the real problem.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital that immigration enforcement wasn’t just happening at ERO, but operating through Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
"They've created this problem in which it's really hard to address an immigration enforcement operation that's out of control because it is funded out of almost every part of the DHS budget," Murphy said.
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who has been involved in direct talks with Senate Republicans and Trump officials, said that the remaining question was to ensure that funding that is going to HSI and CBP does make its way back into ERO, effectively requiring strict guardrails to prevent any funding from going where it shouldn’t.
"The idea is, HSI should do what HSI should do, CBP does what CBP should do, but not end up augmenting and running the pause on the funding of enforcement," King said.
Still, Republicans aren’t happy with Democrats turning their back on the framework that they believed gave them exactly what they wanted. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told Fox News Digital that Democrats couldn’t just "back up" every time a deal was put on the table.
"Look, we did all this work, we talked about framework, we get it squared away with the White House, we get it squared away with our caucus, and then they want something more," Hoeven said. "So I'm not sure."