Michael Gold

Republicans gave $75 billion to ICE and $45 billion to Customs and Border Protection, money that they were allowed to use for immigration enforcement efforts.

It's a huge amount of money, and that money basically comes with no strings attached.

And so the idea is that even with the shutdown, ICE and Border Protection can use that money to keep doing what they're doing, keep doing immigration raids, keep deportations up, and keep conducting this campaign.

Well, like many government departments, there are a lot of agencies under this one.

And so in this case, you're talking about agencies like FEMA, which is Federal Emergency Management Operations.

You're talking about the TSA, who's screening passengers at the airport, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and CISA, which handles cybersecurity.

That's right.

And during previous shutdowns, we've seen that these agencies will continue operating, but their employees have to work without pay.

They cut a lot of services.

And so that tends to be a pain point in any shutdown.

If people have to wait in longer lines at airports, if the public's mad about that, the politics of these issues really start to change.

I think it's important to point out that this is not a fight that Democrats necessarily wanted.

But coming out of the shutdown last year, they felt like they really had a playbook for shutdowns like this that they can use on this particular moment.

Just explain that.

Yeah, so you have to remember, Democrats made the last shutdown entirely about health care.

And they feel like that went really well for them.

It's an issue where they traditionally poll very well with voters and where voters tend to trust them.

And they came out of the shutdown feeling really confident that they had staked out a position on health care.

Right.

That's right.