Dems vote to keep DHS closed despite airport chaos, Iranian sleeper cell threat

Senate Republicans are accusing Senate Democrats of trying to rip apart the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) piece by piece after again blocking a bid to reopen the agency.

Little has changed in the stalemate over the last 27 days of the partial shutdown, and communication breakdowns are dominating what could be opportunities for negotiations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his caucus are still demanding stringent reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Senate Republicans are dug in against their top demands.

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Throughout the day, Senate Democrats tried to offer individual bills to fund pieces and parts of DHS. A fired-up Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., accused Senate Democrats of trying to rip the agency apart at a moment it was designed for, as the war in Iran has spurred threats of retaliation in the U.S. by sleeper cells.

“And that’s at a time when our homeland is under attack, all warning lights are flashing red, and they want to peel apart, piece by piece, the Department of Homeland Security, the comprehensive department of our government to protect the American people, because they want to stand with illegal immigrant criminals,” Barrasso said.

Schumer declared that Senate Democrats would continue to provide piecemeal funding bills to reopen certain portions of the agency, like the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), while negotiations continued.

Both sides are far apart from finding a compromise, as many lawmakers have acknowledged in the ongoing fight to reopen the agency, but Democrats believe that carving out ICE funding could be a palatable option for Republicans, given that immigration operations were funded with President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”

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“We don’t have to tie that disagreement up and use people at the airports and American citizens as hostages,” Schumer said.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., argued that doing so would effectively return Congress to the “defund the police” era and drew a sharp red line against any kind of carveout proposal from Senate Democrats.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who has offered a DHS funding bill without ICE or Customs and Border Patrol, told Fox News Digital that criticism was “not true.”

“It was funded by the [‘one big, beautiful bill,’] and we have told them they’re not going to fund ICE until there are reforms to ICE,” Murray said. “We have made that clear. We put them out there, and they are pretending to just ignore that.”

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., shot back that Republicans have tried on several occasions to temporarily fund the agency with short-term, two-week continuing resolutions (CRs) that Democrats have blocked.

“I assume the Democrat leader is aware of the fact that we have tried repeatedly to fund everything temporarily to allow the negotiations over the ICE budget to continue,” Thune said.

While several attempts from both sides were made to either fund the agency in chunks or reopen it temporarily, each was blocked.

Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who tried to force a vote on a standalone funding bill for TSA as lines at airports around the country swell while security agents go without pay, told Fox News Digital that Republicans’ move to block her bill showed they “don’t care about their constituents, the traveling public, and the folks who work there who are not part of this discussion or this argument.”

“It says the Republican priorities are just for Donald Trump and no one else,” Rosen said.