The Department of Homeland Security is poised to reopen this week, marking the end of a record-long shutdown caused by political division over immigration funding.
The House passed a bipartisan spending bill on Thursday funding all of DHS except for ICE and border patrol through the end of September, sending the legislation to President Donald Trump for his signature after 75 days at a political standstill. The bill passed through an unanimous voice vote on the floor without a recorded tally.
“Despite unrelenting predictions for many of you today in the press that we would fail this week, we did exactly the opposite,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on Thursday. “This will relieve pressure from the Department of Homeland Security. Secretary (Markwayne) Mullin, who I’ve spoken to in the last couple of hours, will be greatly relieved. The president, the administration. We’re not going to have lines at TSA. Everybody will get their pay checks.”
The bill’s passage comes after weeks of tense debate and political fighting, both between and within parties. Conservative Republicans on the floor voiced their opposition to the bill over complaints the legislation omits immigration funding, but none of those members demanded a recorded vote.
“If there was a vote, I would’ve voted no,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy, one of the Republicans in opposition, said after the vote. “But we weren’t going to win that vote, so we decided to let it pass by voice vote.”
The vote comes one day after the House adopted a separate multibillion-dollar budget framework to fund federal immigration enforcement for the next three years — unlocking the reconciliation process for congressional committees to begin drafting the larger framework.
That package will solely fund CBP and ICE while the legislation passed on Thursday will fund the rest of the department, such as TSA and the Coast Guard, through the end of September.
Under the budget reconciliation instructions, both the Judiciary and the Homeland Security committees must write legislation that allocates up to $140 billion for immigration funding. Senate Republican leaders say they expect the final cost to be much lower, possibly around $70 billion total.
The budget blueprint instructs committees to have their portions finished and submitted to the Budget Committee by May 15, two weeks ahead of Trump’s deadline of June 1.