Senate Republicans emerged from a meeting with President Trump at the White House Monday night hopeful that they had a viable deal to end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security and the long security lines at some U.S. airports that have frustrated travelers.
Yet even as lawmakers scrambled to finalize the agreement ahead of a planned recess at the end of the week, Trump on Tuesday stopped short of fully endorsing the tentative deal and the Senate’s top Democrat signaled that he wants further negotiations to ensure reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We’re going to send a counteroffer and it’s going to have some real reforms in it,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
Conservative hardliners also pushed back on the plan, casting further doubt as to whether Congress will be able to quickly pull together the votes needed to end the shutdown, now in its 39th day, and resume paying the nation’s Transportation and Security Administration workers.
What Republicans are proposing: Republican lawmakers reportedly sent Democrats legislation to fund all of DHS except for about $5.5 billion in funding for the enforcement and removal operations of ICE. Democrats have refused to fund the agency, demanding reforms to its tactics, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues thanks to extra funding provided by Republicans as part of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“Under the plan, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations would be funded as well as Customs and Border Protection,” the Associated Press reports. “It would include other changes in immigration operations that Democrats and Republicans had already agreed on, including that officers wear body cameras, but few other restraints.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that the plan would fund 94% of DHS. He rejected the notion that the deal could include reforms to ICE sought by Democrats if it doesn’t also fully fund the agency. “If you are not going to have funding, I don’t know how all of a sudden you can demand reforms,” Thune told reporters.
Instead of pursuing bipartisan reforms, the GOP would then seek to fund the remaining portion of ICE via a separate, partisan budget reconciliation bill — and add elements of the SAVE America Act, the stalled bill containing Trump’s desired election reforms and restrictions on transgender athletes and surgeries, as well as other Republican priorities.
Trump ‘not happy’ with any deal: At a White House swearing-in ceremony for newly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Trump told reporters that he “will take a good hard look” at the potential deal and didn’t want to comment until he saw the details. He added that he wants to support Republicans — but that he probably won’t like whatever deal they want to cut. “I guess they’re getting fairly close,” he said. “But I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”
Those comments were the latest in a string of whiplash-inducing positions from Trump and the White House. They came just hours after a White House official reportedly indicated to news outlets that the emerging deal, while still not final, “seems to be an acceptable solution” to the DHS standoff.
That openness to a deal was itself a dramatic shift from the previous two days, when Trump repeatedly insisted that Republicans should pair the Save America Act with any funding for DHS. He had reportedly also rejected a proposal to pursue a reconciliation bill for immigration enforcement funding.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Sunday night, calling a DHS funding deal “unacceptable” unless it also included his other demands.
GOP hardliners pan the plan: While Republican leaders continue to pursue a deal in the belief that they can line up the necessary votes from both parties, some hardline conservative expressed qualms about the emerging agreement, noting that the Senate’s rules — which require reconciliation bills to have direct budgetary consequences and deal with the debt limit, revenues and/or mandatory spending — could invalidate some of the SAVE America Act measures. Republicans would also have to ensure that nearly all of their members supported the party-line bill, given their narrow House and Senate majorities.
“It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee wrote in a post on X. “And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”
The ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus also called the reconciliation plan “almost impossible” and derided it as “failure theater” by Senate Republicans. “Leaving the fate of the Save America Act up to the Senate parliamentarian is like going all in on triple-zero at the roulette table...It's not even an option,” Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of the group, wrote in a post on X.
The bottom line: Some lawmakers are eager to end the shutdown and the resulting travel disruptions in time for their scheduled two-week holiday recess. This talk of a deal is the most tangible sign of progress in weeks, but it’s not clear yet whether the tentative deal will be cemented quickly or fall apart as abruptly as it emerged. Any agreement in the Senate would still need to be passed by the House, where Trump’s backing could be a deciding factor. If a deal is reached, it would end the shutdown but may only delay the seemingly inevitable failure of Trump’s SAVE America Act.