The government narrowly avoided a shutdown with a temporary funding bill, but the battle intensifies over the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. House Republicans passed all 12 appropriations bills, but Senate Democrats threaten to...



For those who are wondering, “Wait, didn’t we just have a government shutdown?”

The answer is yes, back in the fall of 2025. However, for all the squabbling, the bill that brought that shutdown to an end was written in such a way that only a few essential federal agencies would be funded for a year. All other agencies only received last year’s levels of funding, and that would only last through the end of January.

This Year’s Battleground
Last year’s bickering revolved around the extensions of Obamacare subsidies. This year’s battleground revolves around the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE), with Democrats wanting them defunded and made to leave areas such as Minneapolis, where Trump has ordered their presence. The Republicans want DHS and ICE to have additional funding to carry on their work of rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants with a criminal history.

There are 12 appropriations bills that need to be passed to keep the government open. The House managed to finish passing all of them on Thursday.

"Despite the noise, despite our slim margins, despite the fact that most members in the House have never gone through a regular, member-driven appropriations process before, this team got it done," Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., surrounded by GOP colleagues, said at a news conference picked up by NBC News after the vote. "The House has now passed all 12 appropriations bills, the Senate will soon do the same, and the president is going to sign them into law — what a concept."

The Point of Compromise in the House
The point of compromise reached to make this happen came when the Democrats were able to win dedicated funding for body cameras, which ICE would be required to wear, as well as a reduction in the $115 million budget for ICE and a reduction in detention bed capacity, according to NPR.

“This bill is not perfect,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat whose district covers a long stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, told NPR. “However this bill is better than the alternatives of either funding the department under a continuing resolution or shutting down the government.”

Senate’s Demands to Avert Government Shutdown
The Senate has passed half of the 12 funding bills, and will need to vote on the remaining ones this week. Passage will require 60 votes to avert a government shutdown, and some Democratic votes will be needed. There are several in the Senate who have made it clear that they won’t vote in favor of something that doesn’t at least include restrictions on ICE, but what they’d really like to see is the defunding of the DHS.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) told The Hill on Saturday that he finds what’s happening in Minnesota “appalling” and that, “Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included,”

“We cannot vote for anything that actually adds more money and doesn’t constrain ICE,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Nation last week.

Journalist Bill O’Reilly seems to believe that there is a force at work outside of the U.S. that’s working through what’s happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to damage or even bring about the demise of the U.S. government.

He told WND that a man named Neville Roy Singham is working with the Beijing government, funneling tens of millions of dollars to radical organizations in the U.S. so that “these radical organizations who are then agitating professional people, communists mostly – because Singham's a communist – to go in and foster rebellion.”

Singham was investigated by the FBI in the past, and a House Oversight Committee found ties between him and the Chinese Communist Party, according to a press release from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

President Trump Anticipating Another Shutdown
The fact that the Democrats are threatening to withhold passing the remaining appropriations hasn’t come as any great surprise to President Trump, who told Fox Business in an interview that he believes there will probably end up being another government shutdown:

“I think we have a problem, because I think we’re going to probably end up in another Democrat shutdown…the [previous] shutdown cost us a lot, and I think they’ll probably do it again, that’s my feeling. We’ll see what happens.”

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