The House voted Tuesday to end a partial government shutdown, but now Congress has just two weeks to resolve a disagreement over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the face of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program.
Democrats in both chambers are signaling that they are unwilling to authorize any further spending by the agencies without significant reforms to that program in the wake of the second deadly shooting of an American citizen in a month by ICE agents in Minneapolis, where a massive enforcement surge is still underway. Many, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, describe Trump’s ICE operatives as a de facto “secret police” operating on American soil, as agents are masked and do not provide the same information that regular law enforcement agencies do upon interacting with the public.
