Senate passes budget with two additional weeks of DHS funding

The Senate voted Friday evening to pass the federal budget, funding everything but one entity: the Department of Homeland Security, which received a two-week funding extension in order to negotiate new guardrails around Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). If an agreement is not reached, DHS funding will end and the department will face closure.

The agreement — the result of feverish negotiations between a unified bloc of Democrats in the Senate, their Republican counterparts and the White House — passed by a vote of 71 to 29. However, the Department of Homeland Security will remain without funding over the weekend, until the House meets again on Monday to approve the new temporary bill.

It’s a stunning reversal, of course, for the DHS funding bill, which the Senate was expected to pass with a handful of moderate Democratic votes, despite vocal opposition to its continued funding of ICE. But after federal agents killed Alex Peretti during a protest in Minneapolis, Senate Democrats unanimously announced they would not vote to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security without major reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, forcing the Trump administration into negotiations about keeping the government open. (This would have been the second government shutdown in less than a year.)

Although the Democratic caucus was often divided, the political headwinds were in their favor. A poll conducted by the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority Political Action Committee He found that a large majority of voters were in favor of Democrats imposing a partial shutdown of ICE reforms, and would blame Republicans if the government remained closed.