The federal government has been partially shutdown since last Friday — a fact many people may have missed unless their family was directly affected.
This mini shutdown was nothing compared to the longest in U.S. history, which stretched on for more than a month and ended last November.
This time around, Democrats refused to pass funding for the Department of Homeland Security because of the tactics used in the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
On Tuesday, 21 House Democrats joined Republicans to pass a spending bill that funded most of the rest of the departments until this September. But the funding for the Department of Homeland Security was only extended for two weeks.
Joseph Morton, who covers Washington, D.C. for the Dallas Morning News, said the first chunk of government funding was approved last fall when the 43-day shutdown ended.
“They did a big tranche of them back in the fall, which covered critical programs like nutrition assistance, otherwise known as food stamps, and other programs,” he said. “This second batch covered the Pentagon, the Department of Defense… Now it’s just really all about Homeland Security, which covers Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Morton said that congressional Democrats might not have put their foot down on this issue if not for the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by immigration officers.
“There was a feeling that there was kind of a critical mass of Senate Democrats who were going to swallow the ICE portion of this,” he said. “ICE is going to have plenty of money from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill last summer. So Senate Democrats, everyone thought we’re going to accept this.
And then we saw Alex Pretti get shot. And suddenly the politics really flipped on this. And Democrats realized there was no way they could vote for the Homeland Security portion, which threatened to trigger a partial shutdown of all those other agencies.”
Morton said it does not seem likely that Democrats and Republicans will reach a deal on Homeland Security funding before the February 13 deadline.
“I don’t even think they have figured out exactly who’s responsible for negotiating a deal at this point,” he said. “They gave themselves such a short runway of just these two weeks and the clock is burning… So they really put themselves on a tight clock.
I think everyone assumes that either Homeland Security is going to have a shutdown or they’re going to have to do another stopgap measure to sort of hit this news button on this a little longer because I don’t think there’s any way they get a deal in essentially the next one.”
The banner budget bill passed last summer allocated $170 billion over four years to the Department of Homeland Security, and $75 billion of that was specifically for ICE operations. Because of this, Morton said ICE should continue operating as usual despite the shutdown. However, other parts of the Department of Homeland Security may not.
“This is gonna have a bigger effect on the other agencies within Homeland Security. And there, we’re talking about FEMA, the agency that responds to disasters, we’re talking about TSA, the folks doing security at the airports,” Morton said. “(That) was really the breaking point that we saw in the previous shutdown, when everyone got really serious about ‘we’ve got to fix this,’ was the point at which the airport started becoming a huge mess.”
