TRUMP SIGNS BILL TO FUND DHS
Bipartisan legislation ends near-11-week partial shutdown
Passengers wait in a TSA security checkpoint line at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) in Baltimore, Md.
A U.S. Secret Service agent stands guard Tuesday ahead of the arrival of Britain's King Charles and Queen Camilla to the White House in Washington.
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed legislation Thursday funding Department of Homeland Security agencies including the Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration, ending a partial shutdown that gripped DHS operations for almost 11 weeks.
The logjam was broken when the Republican-controlled House of Representatives unanimously passed a Senate-approved bill that hard-line conservatives refused to consider over the past month.
The House signed off on the legislation as officials warned that current funding was about to run dry, threatening chaos at airports and posing potential vulnerabilities to national security.
It represented a win for Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who pressed House Republicans to pass the bill without modifications.
The legislation, which the Senate passed unanimously twice on March 27 and April 2, will fund DHS agencies that are not involved in Trump's immigration crackdown through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2026. Those agencies include FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Calls for action on the broader DHS bill intensified after Saturday's shooting at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, where prosecutors say a man tried to assassinate Trump.
The White House budget office also warned that the homeland security operations affected would be unable to pay workers in May.
House Republican hard-liners and some other conservatives opposed the DHS bill because its language omitted funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol after federal immigration officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
"We threw a fit, and we had to. We held the homeland bill, the underlying funding bill, because we had to ensure that they could not isolate and eliminate those two critical agencies," said House Speaker Mike Johnson, who blamed Democrats for the bill's lack of immigration enforcement funding.
Republican leaders managed to ease those objections on Wednesday by passing a $70 billion Senate-passed budget blueprint to provide new money for ICE and Border Patrol, which allowed congressional committees to begin writing separate funding legislation for those agencies.
Republicans hope to pass that legislation in May by using a special "budget reconciliation" procedure that allows them to circumvent Democratic opposition in the Senate.
"Now that that box is checked, we are allowed then to proceed and go through with the rest of it," Johnson said.
The two immigration enforcement agencies received more than $130 billion in funding last year through the same procedure — a huge boost that Trump requested to carry out his massive migrant deportation campaign.
Funding for most of DHS ran out Feb. 14, as Democrats pressed Republicans and the White House to accept new constraints on ICE and Border Patrol.
Democrats insisted that immigration enforcement be subject to the same operational rules as police forces across the United States, including a requirement that judicial warrants be obtained before agents can enter private homes, but weeks of negotiations ended in a stalemate.
Johnson eased concerns about DHS funding by ignoring calls from hard-line conservatives who wanted the Senate bill modified to eliminate language specifying that it did not fund ICE and Border Patrol.
Modified legislation would have had to return to the Senate for approval, risking the chance that Democrats might object.
In pressing for House passage this week, Thune, the top Senate Republican, acknowledged the challenge Johnson has faced unifying his fractured 217-212 Republican majority, which delayed consideration of the budget resolution for more than five hours on Wednesday over differences involving separate farm legislation.
"He has to do what he has to do," Thune said. "He needs every Republican and that is a real challenge on a good day. And, you know, sometimes aren't a lot of good days around here."
