Donald Trump reversed course and will accept an offer from Democrats to reopen parts of the Department of Homeland Security, excluding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and end the nation’s growing airport delays, a White House official said on Tuesday.
Homeland Security, which includes both ICE and the Transportation Safety Administration, has been in shutdown mode since February as Democrats have refused to vote to authorize ICE funding unless a set of reforms to immigration enforcement operations and tactics were made nationwide. Among those reforms is a requirement that ICE obtain judicial warrants before conducting searches and an end to roving enforcement operations.
That has left the nation’s airports in turmoil as TSA agents have gone unpaid and are calling out sick and quitting in droves, resulting in hours-long security lines at the nation’s busiest airports. Trump, meanwhile, has deployed ICE agents to the airports as a supplement, even though those agents are not trained in security screening. As a result, congressional discomfort over the increasingly dire situation in the nation’s airports is weakening resistance on both sides of the aisle, as senators seek an off-ramp to the deadlock.
Democrats on Monday offered the White House and Senate Republicans a deal that would reopen every part of DHS, excluding ICE, and allow Republicans to attempt to reauthorize funding for ICE through a budget reconciliation package that would only require 50 votes to clear the Senate. A White House official told NewsNation on Tuesday that the president had decided to accept the offer.
The flip-flop from Trump — the kind of reversal on a hard-line stance that has come to be known as TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) among his critics — came a day after he insisted that Republicans not “make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats” and urged them to work through the Easter break if necessary to force through his voter ID initiative.
Only hours earlier a Republican senator who is a staunch ally of the president had claimed that Trump had rejected the offer out of hand.
On Monday, Sen. John Kennedy told Fox News that Donald Trump rejected one of those off-ramps, which he and another conservative Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, both supported. Their support indicates that the deal supposedly offered by Democrats would have been met with broad support within the GOP caucus.
“The Democrats offered to open up everything but ICE. Ted [Cruz] and I said, ‘Ok, let’s accept their offer,’ and then at the same time we would offer a bill through reconciliation, where we don’t need any Democratic votes to do whatever we wanted to do with ICE. That way we’re out of the shutdown and DHS is back open,” said Kennedy, explaining the framework of the proposed deal.
“We submitted that, [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune submitted that to President Trump. As is his right, [Trump] said, ‘No. No deals with the Democrats.’”
He added: “So we’re back to square one.”
Trump himself posted on Truth Social late Sunday evening: “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.” It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate.”
He even called on the Senate to work through the Easter holiday, and combine the effort to renew DHS funding with his voter ID push: “Kill the Filibuster, and stay in D.C. for Easter, if necessary.” He was no less dogmatic on Monday, writing that he would “fight [Democrats] all the way, and WIN!”
The president’s flip-flop is likely to give Democrats ammunition as they seek to blame the White House for the ongoing shutdown and its effects on travelers nationwide. Airports in cities including Houston, Atlanta, New York and Baltimore among many others have reported serious TSA staffing gaps as Congress quickly approaches another soft deadline: March 31, when thousands of federal workers will once again miss a paycheck.
At the same time, it could anger Democratic voters who may once again see a deal as members of their party taking actions that would allow Republicans to accomplish objectives related to green-lighting the president’s mass deportation agenda while covering themselves, politically, from the fallout.
Democrats in the Senate previously backed down from their demands during a shutdown showdown last year and abandoned an effort to seek the renewal of health care subsidies for millions of Americans after holding out for weeks.
Trump’s status as an obstacle to a deal being struck is not new, but Monday’s confirmation from Kennedy is the first sign of Trump actively torpedoing a specific attempt by Congress to reopen the agency. For weeks, the president has vowed to block any legislation that reached his desk from becoming law over the inability of the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, a piece of voter ID legislation that is opposed by every Democrat in the chamber as well as one Republican, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Republicans in the chamber could only pass the bill by making changes to the 60-vote filibuster rule (or dropping it entirely), which they also do not have the votes to do.
Kennedy’s plan would see most of the agency reopened by cutting a deal with Democrats, and ICE funding authorized through a budget reconciliation measure that would require a simple majority in the Senate to pass. Some lawmakers have separately fretted that Republicans couldn’t pass a bill even with the vote threshold in the Senate much lower.
Republicans used the budget reconciliation path to pass the “Big, Beautiful Bill” last year which served as vehicle for several Republican policy objectives, including a surge of funding for ICE and infrastructure for Trump’s mass deportation program. Senate rules restrict the process from being used to pass anything that isn’t strictly budget-related.
As a result of the president’s decision, there’s no sign of a resolution coming soon for the security screening delays affecting air travelers in many cities. Some lines have been reported as high as three or four hours long, with two airports (New Orleans and Atlanta) reporting TSA call-out rates north of 40 percent, per DHS.
Lines at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport were reaching up to four hours long, officials warned travelers on Tuesday, as were delays in Houston. Other airports such as LaGuardia, site of a fatal crash between a passenger jet and a Port Authority vehicle on Monday, were suspending wait time estimates altogether.
“My flight leaves in 16 minutes. I got up at 3 a.m.,” one frustrated traveler in a Houston TSA checkpoint line told a Fox News reporter during a live broadcast at 10:00 a.m Tuesday morning.
The White House announced over the weekend that ICE agents would be taken off the streets and put into the nation’s airports to fill staffing gaps, but Trump’s own officials weren’t even clear whether those agents were trained to take roles in airport security.
Photos and videos taken at airports on Monday seemed to confirm the opposite. ICE agents were spotted milling around and performing patrol duties while long security lines went unaddressed.
