Senate Democrats get their holdout for NOT including ICE and CBP funding, which will continue to eat up money for other things….
Senate Democrats ARE holding out on new limitations on those two agencies immigration enforcement….
House Republicans HAD to give in with pressure from Homeland that the stealing of money to pay people was gonna run out this weekend….
The House on Thursday passed stalled legislation reopening the Department of Homeland Security, ending a record 76-day shutdown at the agency and resolving uncertainty over whether thousands of federal security workers would be paid in May.
The voice vote after a brief debate brought to a close a bitter partisan fight spurred by President Trump’s immigration crackdown and the tactics of federal immigration officers who fatally shot two U.S. citizens during immigration roundups in Minneapolis earlier this year. Negotiations between the White House and Democrats who were demanding new restrictions on the officers went nowhere, leading to an impasse that cut off funding on Feb. 14.
But it was a dispute among Republicans that has kept the department shuttered for nearly a month, and the G.O.P. had to bypass its own right flank to push through the bill.
Senate Republicans and Democrats had struck a deal on April 1 to fund everything except for the immigration enforcement agencies, vowing to approve that money separately in a bill that Democrats could not block. But the House G.O.P. declined for weeks to act on the measure, with conservatives refusing to vote for a bill that did not fund ICE and border patrol.
House leaders finally took it up on Thursday ahead of a 12-day break, and after the White House requested that the bill be passed immediately.
“It has come to this,” said Representative Mark Alford, Republican of Missouri, as he offered the legislation on the House floor. “We need, no we must, pay our D.H.S. workers.”
The legislation, which Mr. Trump signed into law shortly after it passed, funds the department through Sept. 30, except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection, which received an earlier influx of money from a Republican-only law. Republicans in the House and Senate are now pushing new legislation that would pour an additional $70 billion into immigration operations through the end of Mr. Trump’s second term, using a process that would shield the measure from a Democratic filibuster.
Speaker Mike Johnson had sat on the funding legislation despite encouragement from the White House to pass it, as members of the House lashed out at their colleagues in the Senate for putting them in a bad political situation. To prevent employees from having to work without pay, the White House had shifted existing funds around to meet payroll after disruptions in security screening caused chaos at some airports. But the administration warned this week that it was running short of money to continue doing so….
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