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Seven Democrats voted with Republicans on Thursday to pass a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, despite opposition from their own leadership over unmet demands for additional guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
The DHS bill will be bundled alongside three other spending bills, totaling a combined $1.2 trillion in federal spending. The entire package’s passing is a significant step toward averting a government shutdown come Jan. 30.
Lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted on two separate packages on Thursday afternoon. One groups together three spending bills to fund the departments of War, Education, Labor, Transportation and Health and Human Services. The second is a standalone bill funding DHS, which includes ICE.
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The DHS bill passed by a 220-207 vote with the help of seven Democrats. Only one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted in opposition. The larger package passed with much broader bipartisan support in a 341-88 vote, with 149 Democrats joining Republicans to pass it.
Most Democrats bucked the DHS funding legislation after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and other top Democrats said they were opposed to the bill due to insufficient restrictions against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
With the legislation in the rearview mirror, the House advanced the last pieces of the puzzle needed to avoid a government shutdown by the end of the month. It’s also the first time in nearly 30 years that Congress has avoided funding the government through one massive spending bill known as an “omnibus” or through short-term incremental funding extensions called “continuing resolutions” (CRs).
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With the passage of Thursday’s package, lawmakers will have advanced four small bundles of two to three of their 12 annual appropriations bills.
While some conservatives still called for the 12 bills to be passed as individual pieces of legislation, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., framed the GOP effort as a step toward returning Congress to the way the process is supposed to work on paper.
“This is a big thing,” Johnson told Fox News Digital. “We will be making history this week, having moved 12 [appropriations] bills through the process. A lot of people thought it would be impossible. But we stuck to it, stuck together — it’s a big thing.”
House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., echoed Johnson’s framing.
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“We aren’t here for just another stopgap temporary fix,” Cole said on the House floor. “We are here to finish the job by providing full-year funding. This measure is a product of sustained engagement and serious legislation.”
If passed by the Senate, the bills will eliminate the possibility of a government shutdown for the remainder of FY 2026.
Despite eventually drawing support from Democrats, the final DHS bill faced fierce opposition from most of the party. In their view, the bill failed to shore up safeguards against ICE abuses in the wake of a fatal confrontation between an ICE agent and a woman named Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Good was shot and killed in her car and was accused by Republicans of impeding ICE operations just before her killing.
“Kristi Noem and ICE are out of control. Taxpayer dollars are being misused to brutalize U.S. citizens, including the tragic killing of Renee Nicole Good. This extremism must end,” Jeffries said in a statement ahead of the vote.
While the final bill does include some new safeguards — such as requiring ICE agents to adopt body cameras and to undergo additional training on how to interact with the public — Democrats said those measures fell woefully short.
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“All the guardrails in the world don’t make sense if the administration isn’t going to follow the law and the language that we pass. Members have to take that into account,” Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., the No. 3 Democrat in the House, said. “Ultimately, members are going to vote [for] what’s in the best interest of their districts.”
The Senate will move on the package next week, with the deadline to avert a partial government shutdown fast approaching at the end of this month.
Senate Republicans and Democrats have reached a tenuous truce in the upper chamber after having just exited the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, with neither side inclined to once again shut the lights off in Washington, D.C.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the bulk of his caucus, contend that the best way to rein in some of the administration’s actions, particularly with Trump’s usage of ICE, was through the government funding process.
But despite the four-bill package being constructed with a bipartisan touch, its passage in the upper chamber isn’t guaranteed.
That’s because there is a cohort of Senate Democrats frustrated with the restrictions in the DHS funding bill who contend, like their colleagues in the House, that they do not go far enough.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Committee, signaled that he would not support the package once it comes to the Senate despite being a part of negotiations on the final product.
He argued in a lengthy statement that the bill lacked “meaningful constraints on the growing lawlessness of ICE, and increases funding for detention over the last appropriations bill passed in 2024.”
“Democrats have no obligation to support a bill that not only funds the dystopian scenes we are seeing in Minneapolis but will allow DHS to replicate that playbook of brutality in cities all over this country,” Murphy said.
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