After 75 Days, the DHS Shutdown Is Set to End

The House passed a Senate-approved appropriations bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday, teeing up an end to the longest government shutdown in American history.

The bill will fund much of DHS through Sept. 30, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. But the legislation doesn’t include funding for immigration enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Border Patrol.

President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill to officially end the shutdown, which began on Feb. 14 amid a bitter standoff between Democrats and Republicans over immigration enforcement that was spurred by federal officers fatally shooting two American citizens in Minneapolis at the start of the year. Democratic lawmakers refused to pass a funding bill for DHS unless it included new guardrails on federal immigration agents. But Republicans rejected their demands, arguing that such measures would impede the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The shutdown left thousands of DHS staffers working without pay for weeks, including TSA officers. Many TSA agents called out of work or quit the force entirely to take on other jobs to pay their bills, throwing air travel into chaos as airports struggled with understaffing and travelers waited in security lines for hours. Last month, Trump ordered that TSA officers be paid using existing funds, and a few days later ordered that DHS pay all its employees “with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown.” 

But last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin warned that DHS was set to run out of money to pay staffers by the beginning of May.

Immigration enforcement agencies have mostly been maintaining their normal operations during the shutdown, with law enforcement officers continuing to receive their paychecks with funds drawn from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Congressional Republicans are now launching an effort to set aside an additional $70 billion for immigration enforcement.

It seemed earlier this month as if lawmakers might be close to reaching a deal to end the partial shutdown; the Senate agreed on April 1 to approve funding for DHS, excluding immigration enforcement agencies. But House Republicans declined to act on that legislation for weeks, until they ultimately voted on the proposal on Thursday.

The bill passed by the House includes some guardrails on federal immigration agents that lawmakers agreed on earlier this year, according to Politico. The legislation, though, doesn’t include the new measures that Democrats had been pushing for, such as prohibiting agents from wearing masks.