National Emergency? Democrats Block Homeland Security Funding, Unleashing Political Tension

On Thursday, Senate Democrats voted to block a House-passed bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This action set the stage for President Trump to declare a national emergency and issue an executive order to pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers. The motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 53 to 47, needing 60 votes to advance. Centrist Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) was the only Democrat to vote "yes".

This marked the seventh time since DHS funding lapsed on Feb. 14 that Democrats voted against the measure. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) kept the vote open for hours to give Republican and Democratic negotiators time to hammer out the details of a deal. The deal sought to split off funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) emergency removals operation from appropriations for the rest of DHS.

By keeping the vote open, Thune also blocked colleagues from making requests for unanimous consent on the floor to fund TSA or other critical agencies within the Homeland Security Department. This set the stage for Trump to announce Thursday evening that he would declare a national emergency to issue an executive order to pay TSA workers during the shutdown. Some centrists, such as Sen. Angus King (Maine), an independent who caucuses with Democrats, pressed for guardrails to ensure that the ICE funding in the bill couldn’t be shifted from investigating human trafficking and cybercrimes to migrant apprehension and detention activities.

ICE’s annual budget under the appropriations bill is $10 billion and its emergency removal operations budget accounts for $5.4 billion of that amount, according to a person familiar the Homeland Security appropriations bill.

Several Democratic centrists had asked for the Trump administration to agree to remove all ICE funding from the Homeland Security funding bill in exchange for including funding for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), as long as there were also restrictions on Border Patrol’s interior enforcement authority, according to sources familiar with the negotiation. Democratic senators said before the vote that negotiators were trading proposals but didn’t appear significantly closer to reaching a deal. "I think it’s a good sign that there is paper that is going back and forth. I think there’s a lot of sense of urgency around getting TSA funded but frankly we’re not that far from where we’ve been for weeks, which is Democrat want real reforms to ICE and CBP and are resistant to funding them without reforms," said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who was one of eight Democrats who voted to end the 43-day government shutdown in the fall, said that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) didn’t present the latest GOP counteroffer at the Democratic lunch Thursday.

A group of centrist Democrats have been quietly talking to Republican negotiators in hopes of finding an off-ramp to the impasse. Senate Republicans believe there’s little chance of cutting a deal with Schumer or Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. But they thought they could persuade King and Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), and a few other centrists in the Democratic caucus to vote for a compromise proposal that did not include some of the reforms to ICE demanded by Democratic leaders, such as requiring federal officers to obtain judicial warrants before entering a private home.