Wait, Did the Democrats Just Win a Government Shutdown Fight?

For 41 days, Senate Republicans refused to entertain any bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security that did not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. On Friday, in the dead of night, they caved and passed a bill that did exactly that, ending a shutdown that—because the Transportation Security Administration, like ICE and CBP, is part of DHS—had brought chaos and historic wait times to U.S. airports. That bill will now move to the House of Representatives, where it will need significant Democratic support to pass, while ICE and CBP funding will be kicked to the budget reconciliation process. It was a deal that Democrats had been offering for weeks; on Friday morning, the Republicans took it without receiving anything in return.

Is this what winning looks like? It certainly doesn’t feel like winning. The Democrats had embarked on the shutdown in an effort to push several ICE reforms, including a ban on face coverings, requiring judicial warrants for agents to enter private property, and stricter use-of-force standards and oversight. They did not gain any of them and, having helped end a painful shutdown, no longer have anything that could even charitably be described as “leverage.” ICE reform is all but dead and the agency is funded until 2028, thanks to last year’s reconciliation bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which nearly tripled ICE’s budget.

Still, this is a win. In context, it is actually a pretty big one, given that Democrats have no real power in Washington. But it also raises a more vexing question: Where do they go from here?

The Republicans thought they had the Democrats on the ropes—that they could leverage the airport chaos into victory. Surely the Democrats, desperate not to be blamed for hours-long lines and missed flights, would do what they always do when push comes to shove: cave. Instead, Republicans were the ones who gave in. And, though it comes with considerable caveats—namely the tens of billions already earmarked for immigration enforcement, and potentially more to come through reconciliation—the fact that ICE and CBP aren’t receiving additional funding right now does matter. Every additional dollar that went to those agencies would have helped fund the massive deportation machine this administration is overseeing.

That outcome looks better when you consider that Democrats had minimal leverage. They don’t control either chamber of Congress, which means that they need Republican votes to pass any piece of legislation—and Republicans were resistant to almost all reform, other than requiring agents to have body cameras and visible identification and a few other minor items. But conversely, Senate Republicans, with the exception of the reconciliation process, need a handful of Democratic votes to pass legislation—including spending bills to fund government agencies. That gave Democrats something they could use: Either agree to ICE and CBP reforms, they told Republicans, or we won’t vote to fund DHS. The Republicans refused, and the department shut down.

That was February 14. And for a while, there were no apparent effects, so the shutdown continued amid half-hearted negotiations between the two parties. But then TSA employees started missing paychecks and stopped showing up for work, and Republicans and Democrats started getting serious about resolving the fight. When they couldn’t agree on reforms, they settled on the off-ramp of funding all of DHS except ICE and CBP—and by “they” I mean the five senators, two of them Democrats, who passed the measure in a voice-vote in a near-empty chamber in the middle of the night.

The idea that continuing that shutdown indefinitely could bring the GOP to heel was always farcical, as was the idea that the political price of that approach would be negligible because the public would blame Trump for its chaos more. The Democrats simply never had much to work with. The bill that passed early Friday is an off-ramp that they designed.

Whether House Republicans agree to take it is another matter altogether. The bomb throwers in the House Freedom Caucus have already slammed the Senate bill and demanded House Speaker Mike Johnson put forth a 60-day continuing resolution that funds all of DHS, including ICE and CBP—a non-starter in the Senate. Johnson doesn’t have the power to quash a revolt from his right flank, especially one that lines up with the president’s priorities, so he is dutifully following their lead, per Axios. Given the upcoming congressional recess, there’s a decent possibility that the shutdown will continue indefinitely. If it does, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans will shoulder even more blame for it than they do now.

Still, it’s a deal that suggests that Democrats are still paying for mistakes they made at the start of Trump’s second term. In January 2025, in the wake of Democrats’ shocking election loss, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave vulnerable members an opportunity to showcase their hardline immigration credentials: He signaled he would vote to advance the Laken Riley Act, a hardline immigration bill that had passed the House, without receiving any guarantees to amend it. That egregious bill—which mandated that immigrants be detained even if they were only accused of a crime, and empowered attorneys general to sue government agencies for not enforcing immigration laws strictly enough—was signed into law on the ninth day of Trump’s term. Schumer ultimately voted against it, but it was backed by 12 of his Democratic colleagues (and 46 of them in the House).

In some ways, Friday’s deal recalls the deal Schumer reached last fall to reopen the government after 43 days. The Democrats had forced a shutdown over a demand to restore Obamacare subsidies that were causing healthcare costs to skyrocket. Then, on November 8, Schumer caved, striking a deal to reopen the government in exchange for practically nothing.

The situation this week is similar. Democrats promised their voters they’d use a shutdown to achieve an improbable policy victory, then agreed to end the shutdown without winning it. In both cases, you see the same approach: a reluctance to continue any risky strategy for too long, for fear of taking the lion’s share of the political blowback. I would argue that backing down was more sensible this week than it was in November, but the overall calculus was the same. Schumer is caught in a cycle of making promises to the base that he either has no intention to keep or knows have little chance of being fulfilled.

For a party with little in the way of real power, shutdowns are attractive because they suggest that something is being done—even if nothing really is. It’s a way to show the party’s core voters that it is fighting for the issues that matter most to them. The problem for elected Democrats is that they usually can’t stomach a long fight. They start to get indigestion as airport queues stretch out to the curb, wondering what this might do to their chances in the midterm elections. But this time around, the Democrats stood firm even as TSA wait times hit record levels. They showed their base that they could hold the line, and sure enough it was the Republicans who started panicking: Trump on Thursday said he’d sign an order to pay TSA employees.

That said, it’s not clear what congressional Democrats can do now, that they’ve given up their last sliver of leverage over ICE and CBP, to satisfy a base that is desperate for action and accountability—and unwilling to treat outmaneuvering Republicans alone as a victory. It may well be that they plan to do nothing. Although the Democrats’ overall posture has changed for the better, it’s still clear that Schumer would prefer his party stay out of the way and watch as Trump’s presidency implodes. This approach backfired at the start of Trump’s second term, when it only reinforced the Democrats’ weakness and inability to stop a lawless, rampaging administration. But now Trump is in freefall, trapped in a war he started that now threatens to destroy the global economy. Maybe, for once, Schumer’s strategy makes sense.