WASHINGTON — Forty days into the longest Department of Homeland Security shutdown in American history, the Senate produced what it always produces: a round of meetings that felt like progress, a deal that felt like a deal, and then nothing. Another collapsed framework. Another round of press conferences. Another vote that will fail Thursday because the math hasn’t changed and nobody in power has had the guts to change it.
The math is simple. You need 60 votes to advance anything in the Senate. The Republicans don’t have them. They can’t get them. They haven’t had them since the moment DHS funding lapsed on Feb. 14, and they will not have them when the Senate gavels in for the expected Thursday vote on the latest Republican proposal — a plan to fund 94% of the department while withholding $5.5 billion for ICE’s deportation arm and promising to make it up later, in some future reconciliation bill that half the Republican conference has already called a pipe dream.
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is one of the senators with the most to say about deporting people. He looked at this plan and said what needed to be said: “This idea that they’ll get funded through a reconciliation package is a pipe dream. We’re not going to get a reconciliation package done.”
He said the quiet part out loud, which is all anyone has managed to do for 40 days.
Tuesday night, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama stood outside the White House and told reporters she had a solution. She had just come from a two-hour meeting with President Trump. Also in the room were Sens. Lindsey Graham, Steve Daines and Bernie Moreno. They had a plan. They were confident.
“We do,” she said, when asked if they had an answer. “I am going to be working through the night, so hopefully we can figure out how to land this plane.”
By Wednesday morning, Democrats had rejected the offer as containing no meaningful reforms. By Wednesday afternoon, Britt was back at the Capitol telling reporters there were “deals on the table” and that “we look forward to hopefully finding a way to move forward.” Asked if a deal could close by week’s end, she said: “We have to.”
She has been saying variations of this for weeks.
Britt is the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. That is the committee that is supposed to write the bill that funds DHS. Her job, in the most basic description of it, is to get DHS funded. DHS has not been funded since Feb. 14.
In March, when Sen. Patty Murray of Washington tried to pass a narrower bill — fund TSA, fund FEMA, fund the Coast Guard and CISA, leave ICE and Border Patrol for later — Britt walked onto the Senate floor and objected. She said Murray’s approach would “effectively defund our law enforcement officers.” She said Democrats were playing “political games.”
TSA hasn’t been paid since February. Britt’s objection made sure it stayed that way.
She said she worked through the night. The plane has not landed.
While senators negotiate, LaShanda Palmer goes to work. So does Robert Echeverria — except Echeverria doesn’t anymore. He had nine years as a lead TSA officer in Salt Lake City. He quit during the shutdown because his family used up its savings in the last one. “Emotionally,” he said, “we couldn’t go through that strain anymore.”
More than 480 TSA officers have quit since February. At some airports, 40 to 50 percent of the workforce is calling out on any given day.
Ha Nguyen McNeill, the TSA’s acting administrator, testified before Congress on Tuesday and chose her words carefully: this has produced, she said, “the highest wait times in TSA history.” She warned that without a deal, airports may have to close security checkpoints entirely. By Friday, she said, TSA will have accumulated nearly $1 billion in unpaid payroll.
The FIFA World Cup starts June 11. Even if DHS reopens tomorrow, the TSA won’t have enough trained officers to staff the checkpoints by then. Three months is not enough time to hire, train and certify screeners for the biggest sporting event ever held on American soil.
Delta Air Lines has suspended its specialty congressional services — the dedicated reservation lines, the expedited screening — as a pointed message to the people who caused the problem. The airline CEOs wrote an open letter to Congress. “TSA officers just received $0 paychecks,” the letter said. “That is simply unacceptable.”
The senators, meanwhile, have their own expedited screening.
Across town, in the immigration detention centers that are still very much open — funded by $175 billion from last year’s Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law July 4th — an estimated 40,000 to 45,000 people are waiting. Their lawyers are having trouble getting through. Their hearings are being rushed. Unaccompanied children are appearing alone before immigration judges on “rocket dockets” because the funding for their legal representation was cut.
Twenty-three people have died in ICE custody since October.
The department is not shut down in the places that matter most to the people in power.
The reason for all of this — the reason a Democratic senator will walk to the floor on Thursday and vote no on the Republican plan — goes back to January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis fatally shot two U.S. citizens: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Democrats want the law changed. They want judicial warrants before agents can enter private homes. They want agents to show their faces and their badges. They want body cameras. They want ICE out of schools and churches and hospitals.
The Republicans offered some of this. Not the warrant requirement. Not the mask ban. Not the sensitive locations rule.
Sen. Patty Murray said it plainly on Tuesday: “If we are talking about funding any part of ICE or CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that.”
So the shutdown continues.
Chuck Schumer stood on the Senate floor Wednesday and said the Democratic counteroffer contained “the very same asks Democrats have been talking about now for months.” He called the Republican accusation of goalpost-moving “nonsense.” He said: “Time is of the essence. The Easter holiday is coming.”
Congress leaves for Easter recess at the end of this week. If they leave without a deal, the shutdown crosses 60 days when they return on April 13. That’s the situation. The plane has not landed. And there’s no runway in sight.
