WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats unveiled their official list of demands for reining in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants on Wednesday, using a potential government shutdown as leverage to force Republicans to agree to major reforms before a key deadline this week.
With funding for about half of federal agencies to expire after midnight on Friday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Congress needs to end roving immigration patrols like the ones that have killed two American citizens in Minneapolis this month, institute a uniform code of conduct for federal agents, and require that they wear body cameras while banning masks.
“This is not border security,” Schumer said Wednesday of Trump’s immigration raids, which have targeted U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike. “This is not law and order. This is chaos created at the top, and felt in so many of our neighborhoods.”
“What ICE is doing state-sanctioned thuggery,” he added.
Their list of demands notably does not go so far as to include pulling ICE agents out of U.S. cities entirely, as many Democrats have called for, nor does it ask for Trump to fire his embattled secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. It is a narrower set of policy proposals designed to unify Democrats and appeal to a handful of Republican senators who have expressed concerns with the often-violent tactics deployed by federal immigration agents.
The problem for lawmakers is that funding for DHS and several other federal departments expires on Friday, giving them very little time to avoid a partial government shutdown. ICE would keep operating during a shutdown thanks to money from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, while other agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard would experience a funding lapse.
Democrats are asking Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to uncouple funding for DHS from five other funding bills passed by the House of Representatives last week. Thune didn’t reveal his plans on Wednesday, but suggested he was open to that scenario.
“These are all hypotheticals at this point, and I will reserve optionality to consider that,” Thune told reporters.
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Separating DHS funding from the package could pose its own problems. That bill would require another vote in the House, where Republicans barely control the floor with a razor-thin majority, and where conservatives are already threatening to make their own list of demands that would make Democrats balk.
A big question is how aggressive Democrats are willing to be to get what they want. Even a shutdown solely for DHS would have major impacts, since funding would lapse for the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while ICE would remain funded. Forcing air traffic controllers to work without pay can cause flight disruptions, one of the major pressure points in past government shutdowns.
The last shutdown ended in late November when a clique of centrist Democrats essentially folded, but not before Trump’s behavior during the stoppage — including tearing down the East Wing of the White House and attempting to freeze food benefits for the poor — led to major declines in his approval rating and potentially hurt the GOP in the November elections.
Congress has already passed dedicated funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, meaning there would be no threat to federal food benefits, and also the Department of the Interior, which oversees national parks. But the Labor Department, Health and Human Services Department, Treasury Department, State Department, Transportation Department, Defense Department and Housing and Urban Development Department would all see funding lapse, meaning furloughs for thousands of workers and U.S. troops going without pay.
The potential for another Democratic fold, which would further alienate party leaders from their base, and for Trump to take another hit to his already weak approval ratings has members of both parties nervous about another shutdown. Trump attempted to invite a handful of Democratic senators to the White House on Wednesday for negotiations, CNN reported, but the senators declined the meeting.
Democratic leaders maintain that, compared to past spending fights with the Trump administration where some senators ultimately folded, this time is different. The national outcry over the fatal shootings at the hands of masked federal agents in Minneapolis has given them a renewed sense of purpose, one they said they aren’t backing down from.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve been this united,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a member of Schumer’s leadership team, said after a caucus meeting on Wednesday. “Nobody should mistake our willingness to negotiate for a lack of moral or political clarity.”
Some centrists in the caucus, however, said they’d be willing to consider a short-term funding patch to keep DHS funded at its current levels while the negotiations play out. Funding the agency without putting restraints on ICE could diminish Democrats’ leverage, risking another backlash from the party’s base.
“That’s a reasonable approach, because what we need are reforms for how ICE and obviously how some of the other agencies within DHS operate,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), one of 8 Senate Democrats who voted to end the last government shutdown, told HuffPost. “So that would give us a chance to address that.”
But other Democrats said there was no point in agreeing to a short-term extension of DHS funding without codifying curbs on ICE.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite for promises, given this administration’s past behavior,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) also dismissed the idea of conditioning funding for DHS to ousting Noem, since he didn’t believe doing so would result in reform so long as Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s draconian immigration policy, remains deputy White House chief of staff.
“The name on the door doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the policy,” Murphy told HuffPost. “She’s unqualified, she’s lying to the American people, but I don’t think that that’s the problem. The problem is the president’s closest advisers in the White House.”