Johnson says Senate DHS bill must change as shutdown drags on

The Department of Homeland Security’s partial shutdown is squeezing airport security, disaster response, coastal safety, cybersecurity and immigration enforcement, even as TSA officials have urged Congress to provide full-year funding without delay. The lapse began on Feb. 14 and has now dragged deep into its third month, leaving one of the government’s most operationally sensitive departments caught in a fight over how, and whether, to reopen it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the Senate bill carries “problematic language” that would “orphan” the agency’s immigration operations, and he said the measure would have to change before the House could accept it. That warning put him at odds with the Senate, which unanimously passed a DHS funding bill on March 27 that would finance most of the department but omit money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

The House has already tried a different route. On March 27, it passed a 213-203 measure to fund every agency under DHS at current levels through May 22, a short-term fix aimed at ending the shutdown without rewriting the immigration fight. Johnson’s latest position suggests that proposal is not enough for House Republicans, who have also discussed modifying the Senate bill or advancing a separate GOP-only plan.

That separate track has already taken shape in the Senate. On April 23, Senate Republicans voted 50-48 to advance a $70 billion plan to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the next three years, a move intended to give those enforcement agencies their own lane outside the broader DHS dispute. Democrats have pressed for guardrails on immigration enforcement before approving money for ICE and Border Patrol, while hard-line conservatives have criticized any package that leaves those agencies out.

The result is a funding standoff with no single consensus vehicle and no clear off-ramp. DHS oversees the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, counterterrorism efforts, cybersecurity operations and immigration enforcement, so each day without a broader deal deepens the operational strain. The question now is whether lawmakers are fighting over the substance of immigration policy, or using the DHS bill as leverage in a familiar shutdown cycle that has already kept the department partially closed for more than two months.