The House of Representatives voted to reopen major parts of the U.S. government Tuesday afternoon, setting up a major fight between the White House and Senate Democrats to enact changes to the way the federal government is conducting immigration enforcement.
The House voted 217-214 to pass legislation the Senate passed last week, with 21 Republicans voting against it, but 21 Democrats voting for it. President Donald Trump signed the legislation shortly thereafter.
The legislation would fund the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Education and Transportation for the rest of the fiscal year. But it would only fund the Department of Homeland Security – which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Protection – for two weeks.
Democrats hope to use this two-week span to negotiate changes to the way ICE and CBP conduct themselves after ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good and CBP officials shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month. In the hours after, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem called Pretti a domestic terrorist, which triggered even some Republicans to say she needed to resign. Both killings, and the government responses, sparked protests and calls for reform for Trump’s deportation plan.
Despite the funding passing the house, many Democrats, including those from Minnesota, opposed it.
“Look, we need to put guardrails in place. But short of Kristi Noem’s ICE getting the hell out of Minnesota, I'm not voting for a damn penny to ICE,” Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota told The Independent. Craig, who is running for the state’s open Senate seat, said that her brother-in-law, who is Latino, was surrounded by ICE agents because he is Latino.
“Until that kind of s***stops, I won't vote for a damn penny,” she said.
President Donald Trump had dispatched ICE to Minneapolis under the guise of cracking down after a massive welfare fraud scandal involving some Somali-Americans. But it has also led to some U.S. citizens and those with pending immigration in the United States legally being detained.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made his demands clear last week, saying that he wanted to end roving patrols throughout American cities, a removal of masks for ICE and CBP agents, and body cameras for agents.
But House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back on the idea that ICE officers needed to remove masks.
“Because unlike your local law enforcement in your hometown, ICE agents are being doxxed and targeted,” he told The Independent.
In response to the killings in Minneapolis, the White House sent “border czar” Tom Homan to Minneapolis, and he reportedly told Schumer that removing masks would put his agents at risk.
“And if you unmask them, and you put all their identifying information on their uniform, then they will obviously be targeted, they and their families, probably,” he said. “many of the complaints that some of the Democrats have had about all this, I think, will be mooted now that you have, you have him in charge.”
But even if the government had shut down, ICE would likely still have impunity to operate thanks to the fact that Republicans voted to give the agency $75 billion in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed last year.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said that would be the next step for Democrats in the near future.
“Now it’s our task to figure out how to claw back what has essentially supercharged this agency into a relentless domestic paramilitary,” she told The Independent on Monday evening.
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