One DHS Funding Battle After Another
I have worked through multiple government shutdowns and I know how hard it is to continue through them without pay or certainty for the future. It’s striking that after everything we’ve seen over the past 15 months, Republicans are willing to block funding for DHS rather than constrain immigration enforcement in any way. I worry about how the DHS employees will pay their rent or child care costs, and about the work that may or may not be getting done during this time.
I worked at DHS for almost 14 years, including a year as the acting ICE Chief of Staff, so I understand how important the agency’s mission is, even if I strongly disagree with the Trump Administration’s conception of it. I also experienced firsthand the depth of ICE’s structural, policy, and operational challenges.
Some of my proudest accomplishments during my time at ICE addressed some of those problems. For example, I implemented the DHS sensitive locations and courthouse enforcement policies, measures that constrained the operations we are now seeing play out at schools, churches, and other community spaces. I also instituted the first ICE body-worn camera program and helped end family detention. All of these reforms, however, were tossed aside within weeks of the start of the second Trump Administration.
As of Friday morning, it looked like the funding impasse had been resolved and the Senate’s plan to fund most of DHS —except for ICE and Border Patrol — was on track to become law. Instead of passing the Senate bill, House Republicans and three Democrats passed a different bill that temporarily would fund all of DHS, including ICE and Border Patrol. Because the bills don’t match, legislators have to go back to the drawing board and the DHS shutdown will continue.
During previous shutdown fights, Democrats too often fractured under pressure. This time, even without much political leverage or agreement on a vision for immigration, they held firm, insisting on no additional funding for ICE or Border Patrol without meaningful guardrails on immigration enforcement.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by that resolve and hope it is a precursor of good things to come.
But what this fight has revealed, more than anything, is that immigration may no longer be the political liability many Democrats have long assumed it to be. For years, Republicans dominated the immigration debate with fear-based messaging. And Democrats generally opted to avoid the issue rather than work toward meaningful reform.
And yet Americans do not broadly oppose immigration. The notion that we are a country of immigrants is woven into the country’s identity, its mythology, self-conception, and sense of purpose. Most Americans believe the country is strengthened by its diversity, its ability to absorb people from different backgrounds, and the economic dynamism that immigration brings.
What Americans do dislike—deeply—is disorder. They recoil from chaos, from the sense that systems are breaking down or operating without limits. And over the past two administrations, that’s exactly what they have witnessed.
During the Biden administration, the border became a flashpoint. There were widely shared images of thousands of migrants arriving daily, overwhelming facilities and cities. This created a perception that control had been lost, shaping public opinion and leaving Democrats politically rattled.
Under Trump, a different kind of chaos has unfolded: not at the border, but inside U.S. cities. Immigration laws are being enforced, but in ways that feel reckless, unsafe, and unevenly applied. We’ve seen it in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Charlotte, and Chicago, but Minneapolis is the most extreme example.
What unfolded in Minneapolis did not look like typical immigration enforcement: federal agents deployed tear gas, conducted mass arrests, and detained people indiscriminately. They killed two U.S. citizens, retaliated against protestors, entered homes without judicial warrants, and used race and ethnicity as primary reasons to stop people for questioning. A whole web of resistance sprang up in response. Residents protested, provided mutual aid, and stood up for their neighbors and city.
The scale of the government operation made the city feel as though it was under occupation and images circulating online brought the shocking reality into homes across the nation. Many Americans recoiled at what they saw. It forced them to confront what immigration enforcement can look like when it operates without clear limits. It made them think –– maybe for the first time –– about what immigration enforcement should look like. It reset the baseline of what people consider acceptable.
Many Americans now see ICE and Border Patrol as powerful, sometimes dangerous, forces in their communities. Unsurprisingly, following the Minneapolis operations, public opinion of ICE fell sharply. What is more telling, however, is that those numbers have not meaningfully rebounded, even as the administration has reduced the visibility of its enforcement actions.
That shift could explain the political dynamics we’ve just witnessed in the DHS funding fight. Democrats did not suddenly discover a love of immigration fights and they didn’t wake up eager to stake their position on one of the most historically fraught issues in American politics. They held firm because the political ground beneath them had moved. Their constituents had seen something they could not unsee. The risks of inaction or of enabling further excess now outweighs the risks of the political fight.
In that sense, public opinion didn’t just follow political leadership; it enabled it. The American people’s reaction to Minneapolis may well have stiffened the spines of Democratic lawmakers. It gave them the space and, arguably, the obligation, to demand constraints that would have been politically unthinkable just a few years ago.
The deeper question is whether this shift will last.
There are reasons to hope it might. Federal operations in major cities have targeted not just undocumented immigrants but also citizens and long-term residents. And because the actions have been widely documented online, they have left a lasting impression that’s hard to erase from public memory. Those factors make it harder to reframe or forget.
We are hopefully seeing the beginning of a more durable realignment in how Americans think about immigration enforcement. This realignment is not a rejection of immigration enforcement itself, but a demand that it operate within visible, enforceable bounds. A demand not just for control, but for restraint.
That is the real takeaway from the DHS funding battle. Democrats held the line not because they changed, but because the country did.
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