Why This Shutdown Is Different
During the previous government shutdown, President Trump reveled in the chance to fire federal workers, expand his executive authority, and steer taxpayer dollars toward his allies and away from his perceived political enemies. After a record-setting 43 days of gridlock—during which Trump pursued those goals with varying degrees of success—several Democrats abandoned their quest to force Republicans to negotiate a health-care deal, and voted to end the shutdown. As he signed the bill, flanked by congressional Republicans, who had largely unified around the idea that they would not entertain a policy negotiation while the government was closed, Trump congratulated his party on a “very big victory” over the Democrats.
The second government shutdown of Trump’s second term ended today with much less fanfare and bravado from the commander in chief. This time, Trump negotiated both before and after the government was closed, going so far as to call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to work out a deal on the main point of contention: his administration’s mass-deportation campaign.
Trump is largely the same person that he was four months ago, when the previous shutdown began. (If you need evidence, in recent days, he has abruptly announced plans to close and completely rebuild the Kennedy Center, suggested that he wants to “nationalize” the midterm elections, and threatened Iran with an attack from “a massive Armada.”) But his push to quickly resolve the latest shutdown highlights how much the political landscape on immigration has shifted following daily, videotaped clashes between masked federal agents and Minneapolis residents, two of whom were killed last month.
“I’m glad we got this done,” Trump said from the Oval Office as he signed the bill and hailed the various programs the legislation would fund. He didn’t address the difficulties that come next: negotiations over accountability measures for federal immigration agents and a lapse in funding for the Department of Homeland Security if a deal can’t be reached within 10 days.
Although Republicans have generally opposed considering policy concessions as a prerequisite for opening the government, Trump and his allies had little choice but to treat this shutdown differently, Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, told me. Plunging public support for Trump’s immigration crackdown has reoriented the politics of government shutdowns; the political shift is a culmination of “all the things that we’ve seen on video, everything that America has reacted to in the past few weeks, when we’ve had two American citizens who have been killed,” he said. “Now, when you talk about immigration, it is essentially being defined as what’s happening in Minneapolis, and most Republicans know that it’s bad for them.”
On January 24, Alex Pretti became the second American killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. Since then, the Trump administration has been looking for ways to contain the political fallout. Trump has dispatched the administration’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, to Minneapolis with explicit orders to calm tensions, had positive phone calls with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and expressed openness to de-escalating the aggressive tactics used by some federal agents. The president, though, has since begun to retreat from his conciliatory tone, taking to social media to attack Pretti and telling reporters that he is “not at all” pulling back from Minnesota.
Read: [‘Trust has been breached’]
But even as he began shifting away from de-escalation, Trump made clear that he was willing to work with Democrats to avoid another government shutdown. The bill that Trump signed today funds most of the government through the end of September and continues funding for the Department of Homeland Security until February 13. Lawmakers and the White House are supposed to use the next 10 days to negotiate broader reforms to DHS’s operations that Democrats say would be necessary before they vote for additional funding for the agency that is carrying out Trump’s mass-deportation effort.
Democrats, who emerged from the previous shutdown without achieving their goal of extending subsidies for health care, say that they are now determined to extract concrete changes in how the nation’s immigration authorities operate. “Immigration and border protection are core responsibilities of our government, but this version of ICE has strayed far beyond that core function,” Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote in a statement today after voting against the funding bill. She said that Congress should demand that DHS shift away from the “chaos and deadly consequences” of its current operations.
Democrats have threatened to withhold their votes on funding DHS beyond next week if their demands are not met. Although the department’s immigration push has been infused with tens of billions of dollars in funds from legislation Congress passed last year, a shutdown of operations could affect other parts of the department’s budget, including TSA and FEMA. Democrats are calling for changes that include requiring ICE agents to stop wearing masks and to obtain judicial warrants in immigration operations. They also want independent investigations of the killings of Pretti and Renee Good. Some are calling for the resignation of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who has drawn bipartisan criticism for accusing Pretti and Good of “domestic terrorism” hours after each was killed.
Democrats’ push may already be making an impact. Noem said yesterday that ICE agents working in Minneapolis will begin wearing body cameras immediately and that agents across the country will be doing the same once funding becomes available. But Democrats are likely to face more resistance to their other demands. Asked about judicial warrants today, Trump was noncommittal. “I haven’t even thought about it,” he told reporters. “I’m not thinking about search warrants.”
He deferred to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said that he opposed the call for judicial warrants. Graham pivoted to calling for a ban on sanctuary cities, something Trump said he will be pushing for as negotiations take place in the coming days. Other Republicans have rejected several Democratic requests as unrealistic or unworkable. Senate Majority Leader John Thune predicted that lawmakers would need to pass another extension of DHS funding before February 13, calling the prospect of making significant reforms by next week an “impossibility.”
But, buoyed by the newfound leverage they have to draw Trump to the negotiating table, many Democrats are looking to exert maximum pressure in the coming days. There is disagreement between the Senate and the House, as well as between more moderate and more progressive Democrats, about how hard of a line to draw in the upcoming discussions. House Democrats largely opted not to support the funding agreement negotiated by their Senate counterparts, with some saying that funding DHS at current levels even for a few days would be inappropriate. But Democrats—who have at times opposed government shutdowns due to the potential harm to federal workers and those who rely on the social safety net—are navigating new terrain as they try to rein in Trump.
Recent changes narrowing the kinds of tasks agencies can perform when funding lapses also mean that shutdowns have the potential to hit a larger number of Americans more harshly than before, Abigail André, the executive director of the Impact Project, told me. “The changes some agencies made to shutdown protocols made shutdowns more painful for communities and, therefore, more politically costly,” she said.
Trump has acknowledged that shutdowns can be a political liability. When Democrats claimed big victories in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, and elsewhere last year on an Election Day that fell during a shutdown, Trump told his fellow Republicans that the government’s closure had played “a big role” in the results. When Trump called Schumer last month to negotiate, the president said: “I hate shutdowns,” the minority leader told The New York Times. Schumer suggested that they cut a deal to rein in ICE. Trump was also hearing from members of his own party, who were reaching out privately to express their dismay over the scenes emerging from Minnesota. Several have spoken out publicly as well, laying the groundwork for negotiations.
When I asked the White House about Trump’s willingness to negotiate this time rather than dig in his heels as government funding lapsed, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not acknowledge the shift, instead blaming Democrats. “President Trump has been consistent—he wants the government open,” she told me. “Democrats should not try to use the American people as leverage to achieve their policy goals.”
But many Democrats say that they are simply following the lead of their constituents, who have shifted sharply against Trump’s immigration policies in recent weeks as masked federal agents have descended on American cities. A Fox News poll released last week found that 59 percent of voters say that ICE has been “too aggressive” in its deportation tactics, a 10-point jump since July.
Andrew O’Neill, the national advocacy director for Indivisible, a progressive organizing group, said in a statement that Republicans are now “on their back foot,” and warned Democrats that voting for any legislation that does not overhaul DHS would constitute a “failure to meet this moment.” Alluding to the street protests that have frustrated ICE’s efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere, he said: “The public has done its part, and now Congress must do theirs.”
Heye, the Republican strategist, told me that although Trump has an ability to control the news cycle around him, the immigration debate is dominating in an election year that Republicans had promised they would use to address voters’ concerns about the cost of living. Avoiding a prolonged shutdown over unpopular immigration tactics is part of a broader effort to refocus as the midterms approach, he said: “The fact that Americans have been killed means that this will have a longer political memory,” he said. “Republicans should be talking about, Here’s what we’re trying to do to fix costs, and all of this gets in their way.”
Elaine Godfrey contributed to this report.