March 27, 2026
At about 2:30 this morning the Senate quietly passed a bill to fund DHS that means TSA and FEMA and the Coast Guard will get paid– except under this deal ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection will not. But this is not over!
As I said the Senate passed this deal by a voice vote – unanimous consent – and only a handful of Senators were even on the floor at the time. Yes – they can do that. But it still needs to pass in the House and as I reported yesterday, that’s a whole different ball of wax.
But first – let me be clear – this is the deal that Democrats have been offering Republicans for weeks. They have been saying let’s fund all of Homeland Security so TSA can get paid and we don’t have this chaos at the airports and we can continue to negotiate the policy changes for ICE and CBP. For weeks Republicans have been saying no. Mostly because the president has been saying don’t take that deal. But I should also be clear Democrats also did not get the major concession they wanted out of this deal either. In no way did Republicans agree to may *any* changes to the way ICE and CBP operate on the streets of America.
So what changed? Why agree to this deal now? Well – I’m sure President Trump’s post to social media last night saying that he was going to order TSA agents to get paid had something to do with it on the Republican side. But also — remember I’ve been reporting in several videos – that there was going to come a point where the chaos at airports was going to get to be too much and someone was going to have to do something? Well – that’s obviously what happened. Democrats weren’t backing off their demands for ICE and CBP policy changes and Republicans weren’t backing off their demands to not change those policies…and the chaos was getting out of hand so boom – that’s how you get a quite middle of the night voice vote with like five Senators on the floor. Plus – let’s be very clear – the Senate wants to go on their two week recess which starts today.
Now – the House is a whole different story. Speaker Johnson has been warning that his Republican caucus is not a fan of *not* funding ICE and CBP and so the far right members are going to be a no on this. And Democrats in the House are pissed that after all this – they didn’t get the policy changes they want. So what’s going to happen? It’s unclear – but we are expecting the House to take up this bill maybe sometime today or tomorrow. Fun fact — the House’s two-week recess is also supposed to start today – so – I think they’re going to try and move this along as quickly as humanly possible.
See the announcement here.
