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At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding, as popular fury over the
violence and lawlessness of federal agents from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol made Senate Democrats refuse to
agree to fund DHS without reforms. And yet, because the Republicans lavished
money on ICE and Border Patrol in their July 2025 budget reconciliation
bill—the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—those agencies will
continue to operate. The 260,000 federal employees affected by the partial
shutdown will come from other agencies in DHS, including the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), and the
Coast Guard.
A measure to fund DHS passed the House by a majority vote, but in the Senate,
the filibuster allows the Democrats, who are in the minority, to make demands
before the measure can pass. On February 4, Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate
majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a
letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure to
appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Those demands are pretty straightforward. The Democrats want federal agents to
enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the
administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves
could sign off on raids, a decision that runs afoul of legal interpretations of
the Fourth Amendment). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their
names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law
enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents
detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or
language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities,
schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.
They want agents to be required to have a reasonable policy for use of force
and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal
agents to coordinate with local and state governments and for those governments
to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS
detention facilities to have the same standards as any detention facility and
for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to
sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have
unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.
They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for
gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal
agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not
paramilitaries.
As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect
Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and
should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.
Democrats said White House offers were insufficient to address their concerns,
although the White House did not make its position public. Before they left
Washington yesterday for a ten-day break, senators refused to fund DHS in its
current state.
Before the vote, administration officials appeared to try to soften the image
of the federal agents who have terrorized Americans, arrested citizens and
legal immigrants as well as undocumented immigrants, and shot people. Trump’s
immigration advisor Tom Homan, who took over in Minneapolis after Border Patrol
agents acting under the leadership of then-commander Greg Bovino shot and
killed a second American citizen in that city, told reporters yesterday that
that administration will end its surge of federal agents into Minneapolis,
saying it had achieved “successful results” including 4,000 people arrested.
Agents will remain in the city, he said, but the surge of thousands of agents
will end. Torey Van Oot of Axios adds that more than a dozen federal
prosecutors resigned after the Department of Justice declined to investigate
the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and support for Trump’s handling of
deportations cratered as Americans saw children tear-gassed and citizens shot.
Acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told the House Homeland Security Committee on
Tuesday that the agency is training agents adequately before they go into the
field and that once there, they are properly enforcing U.S. immigration laws.
“And,” he added, “we are only getting started.”
But Lyons’s claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on
Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly closed the
airspace over El Paso, Texas, for what it initially said would be ten days.
Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical
helicopters, and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the
closure of airspace after 9/11. Confusion reigned, since no one had notified
even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000 people. Shortly afterward, the FAA
reopened the airspace.
Administration officials immediately said the problem was drones flown into the
area by drug cartels, though such drone flights are common. Then the media
reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new antidrone
defense system without signoff from the FAA on danger to civilian planes. Then
it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had permitted U.S. Customs
and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an antidrone
laser near Fort Bliss, where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana. Someone
then used the laser without informing the FAA. And then it turned out that the
“drones” agents used the laser to shoot down were actually party balloons.
That the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself
concerning, but that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso’s
airspace was in the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is
also a problem. So, too, of course, is that the administration’s initial
impulse was to lie about what happened.
In his testimony, Lyons maintained that ICE is indeed prioritizing the removal
of undocumented immigrants with records of violent crime, enabling Republicans
to claim that Democrats who want to rein ICE in are deliberately endangering
public safety. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported this week that
documents from DHS itself show that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000
immigrants arrested in Trump’s first year had either convictions or charges for
violent crimes, with fewer than 2% either charged with or convicted of homicide
or sexual assault.
Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively
expanding across the United States in the past months. It has bought or leased
new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the country’s
largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas. Feiger reports that
DHS asked the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government
properties, to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out of
“national security concerns.”
Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today
that ICE officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across
the country. ICE will retrofit sixteen of them to become processing centers
that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees at a time before funneling them into
eight megacenters that can hold up to 10,000 detainees each.
The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to
imprison noncitizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for
asylum. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an unannounced oversight visit
to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland, yesterday. He saw “60 men
packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet
in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum
foil blankets.” Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a
Russian family in the U.S. seeking asylum. For four months, they have been
incarcerated at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where there
is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or worms.
In a statement, a spokesperson for DHS accused the media of “peddling hoaxes”
about poor conditions in detention centers.
But DHS has lied about so many things that no one should take their words
seriously. In January, when an ICE agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in
Minneapolis, DHS claimed that he had driven away from a “targeted traffic
stop,” crashed into a parked car, and run. When an ICE agent caught up with him
and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, DHS said, the men had attacked the agent with a
snow shovel and a broom handle. DHS said an agent had then fired on the men “to
defend his life.” The men escaped but were later captured and charged with
assault.
Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped the charges, saying “newly discovered
evidence” suggested the allegations were false. Aljorna’s lawyer explained: “It
is my understanding that the video surveillance evidence that captured the
incident was materially inconsistent with the federal agent's claims of what
happened.”
Last night, in a deep expose of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her
advisor Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporters Michelle Hackman, Josh
Dawsey, and Tarini Parti described a department in chaos. Noem and
Lewandowski—who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the
department together—are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to
elevating Noem to the presidency. The reporters detailed the focus on image,
the decimation of ICE by firing or demoting 80% of the career field leadership
that was in place when they arrived, the apparent steering of contracts to
allies, and Noem and Lewandowski's excessive demands, including “a luxury 737
MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country.”
DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane but is in the process of buying
it.
DHS and the violence of federal agents have exacerbated rather than silenced
opposition to the Trump administration, causing a crisis for it as the American
people increasingly turn against it. Trump is adamant that Republicans must win
the 2026 elections and so is calling for new election laws, claiming that
Democrats can win elections only through the illegal votes of undocumented
immigrants.
This ties DHS and American elections together. Today Noem told reporters in
Arizona that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or
SAVE) America, measure to secure U.S. elections, lying that noncitizens are
voting for Democrats and thus enabling them to win elections. This is an old
saw Republicans have used since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the
Motor Voter Act, and it has been repeatedly debunked. Indeed, when reporters
asked for an example of noncitizen voting, she said she couldn’t point to a
case but assumed it happened. The bill not only would require voters to show
either a passport or a birth certificate with the name matching theirs in order
to register, but would also require states to purge their voting rolls every
month. The measure passed the House Wednesday but must overcome a filibuster to
pass the Senate.
Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune
reported today that DHS has been using an electronic tool called Systematic
Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), previously used to check
eligibility for public benefits, to find noncitizen voters in a database made
up of confidential data from different government agencies. That information
includes confidential data from the Social Security Administration, accessed by
the Department of Government Efficiency. Republican secretaries of state in
twenty-seven states have agreed to use SAVE to check their voter rolls.
But Fifield and Despart report that the system makes "persistent
mistakes,” frequently assessing naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The system
automatically refers those individuals to DHS for possible criminal
investigation, and in certain states, individuals have had to prove their
citizenship to be reinstated as voters. “This is not ready for prime time,”
county clerk Brianna Lennon of Boone County, Missouri, told the reporters. “And
I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters
for bad data.”
And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands. Although
the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress, and Congress alone, that
can make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change
the nation’s voting laws all by himself. The account posted: “The Democrats
refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They
want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired.
I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on
this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near
future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by
Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship,
and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or
Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
Today, ICE protesters carried a giant U.S. Constitution through the streets of
Minneapolis, demanding that federal agents honor the rights the Framers
established with that foundational document.
