House Passes Senate-Approved DHS Funding Bill, Ending Partial Shutdown

The House cleared H.R. 7744, the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2026, on a 221-209 vote, pushing the department back onto full-year funding and ending the partial shutdown that had frozen DHS operations since February 14, 2026.

The bill funds DHS for the remainder of fiscal 2026 after a continuing resolution expired and Congress failed to enact a regular appropriations measure on time. The Senate Appropriations Committee said the homeland security bill carries a base discretionary total of $64.4 billion, including $3.0 billion in defense spending and $61.4 billion in nondefense spending. The shutdown, which began when temporary funding ran out, had become part of a larger stalemate over how far Congress would go in financing immigration enforcement.

That dispute was not settled neatly. Senate appropriators said the conference summary would limit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to spending $3.8 billion of its annual budget on detention, a restraint that underscored how tightly immigration enforcement funding remained tied to broader negotiations over detention policy. Senate Democrats had earlier said they removed the DHS bill from a larger package so talks could continue over ICE and Customs and Border Protection, signaling that they were still willing to use the appropriations process to force policy changes.

House Republicans took the opposite view. The House Appropriations Committee said this was the second time legislation to fully fund DHS and protect the nation’s border had advanced through the chamber, framing the vote as a break from the shutdown politics that had followed the lapse in funding. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole argued that safeguarding the homeland should not be treated as a bargaining chip, putting the debate squarely in constitutional and institutional terms rather than as a routine spending fight.

The result leaves clear winners and losers. DHS agencies gained operating stability after more than two months of partial shutdown pressure. Border security advocates won a full-year funding bill, but not without accepting a detention cap that limits ICE’s flexibility. Democrats also won a tangible restriction on detention spending, while hard-line immigration negotiators in both parties saw the final compromise fall short of the broader leverage they had sought. The bill, introduced in the House on March 2, 2026, showed that Congress was willing to fund DHS, but only by narrowing the space for immigration enforcement to expand unchecked.