Scott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News.
WASHINGTON — A small band of moderate House Democrats teamed with Republicans on Thursday to pass a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, overcoming a revolt by most Democrats furious about ICE’s aggressive operations in Minneapolis and other U.
S. cities. The vote was 220-207, with seven Democrats breaking with their party and voting yes. The House also passed a separate package of bills funding other federal agencies in a broad, bipartisan vote, in a bid to avert a partial government shutdown on Jan. 31. In an unexpected twist, the House unanimously voted to add an amendment to the package repealing a law crafted by the Senate that allows eight particular Republican senators to sue the government for a minimum of $500,000 in damages after their phone records were collected as part of a Jan. 6 investigation. House members in both parties have been critical of that law since it passed as part of the deal to end the government shutdown two months ago. Thursday's vote puts the Senate in a jam, forcing it to accept repeal or shut down the government next week when the House is scheduled to be on recess. The House has combined the repeal amendment and six of its approved spending bills into one package. It now heads to the Senate, where Appropriations Committee leaders have signed off on the funding deal. The package represents the final tranche of the 12 spending bills Congress needs to pass each year to keep the government open and will fund it through the end of September. “You see, we aren’t here for just another stopgap, temporary fix,” House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said before the vote. “We’re here to finish the job by providing full-year funding.” The successful DHS vote came as some on the far left called on Democrats to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good, a Minneapolis woman and U.S. citizen, this month. And in a sign of how the ICE issue has become a major political issue for Democrats, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and his top lieutenants joined rank-and-file Democrats in voting no on the DHS funding bill, saying it lacked sufficient guardrails and accountability for ICE. Liberal Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a lead negotiator of the broader funding deal, also voted no on the DHS bill — an unusual move for House Democrats' top appropriator. “ICE is out of control and operating, in far too many ways, in a lawless fashion,” Jeffries told reporters, accusing the agency of “using taxpayer dollars to inflict brutality on the American people,” including by killing Good “in cold blood.” The leaders made that decision even after DeLauro and other top Democratic appropriators — who work closely with leadership — struck the bipartisan, bicameral deal to fund the government through the 2026 fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. “You have to ask every individual member who’s going to vote the best interest of their district why they’ve chosen to vote one way or the other,” Jeffries said when asked about the split over ICE. The seven Democrats who voted in favor were: Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both of Texas; Jared Golden of Maine; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state; Don Davis of North Carolina; and Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, both of New York. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the only Republican to vote no. Some Democrats lamented that their party had not fought as hard for ICE guardrails as they had for an extension of Affordable Care Act funds, when they forced a 43-day shutdown last fall. “Instead of explaining to the American people where we are and what the immigration system is and why it is broken — it is broken, but why it’s broken and what are fixes for it? — we just have a bunch of Democrats who have gone around trying to be tougher on immigration than Republicans. It’s never worked,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “You can’t out-Republican Republicans because you’re going to lose your base and you’re not going to get any of the Republicans to come over to you.” She said many Democrats are afraid to lean in to pro-immigrant stances after Trump used immigration in his 2024 campaign victory. Jayapal suggested that DeLauro and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top two Democratic appropriators, negotiated DHS funding as part of the broader bill because “they wanted to get this all done. Appropriators often — they just care about getting the bills through.” DeLauro and Murray have pointed out that Democrats did secure $20 million for body cameras for ICE personnel, as well as cuts to ICE funding for enforcement and removal operations and the number of detention beds. While most Democrats are treading carefully on immigration, others in the party are going all out in opposition to ICE as they seek to channel the public backlash to the agency. Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., facing a fierce primary challenge from the left, has authored the Abolish ICE Act, which would dismantle the agency. Meanwhile, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., this week introduced the MELT ICE Act, which would end DHS’s funding to detain or monitor immigrants, and redirect that money to health care, housing and other social services in local communities. Neither stand a chance of passage under Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Murray, instead, focused on a series of victories she said Democrats scored in the wider government funding package, including funding for child care, housing assistance, mental health and Pell Grants — in many cases defeating Trump’s proposed cuts. “There is much more we must do to rein in DHS, which I will continue to press for,” Murray added. “But the hard truth is that Democrats must win political power to enact the kind of accountability we need.”
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