Michael Gold

But on the other hand, they wouldn't have gotten anything out of this back-and-forth negotiation.

And there is a concern, mostly expressed privately, that if you fund the TSA and the Coast Guard and all these other agencies, Republicans will never have any incentive to agree to any of these reforms on ICE.

Because...

There won't be any reason for them to do it.

because the Republicans, as you might remember, last year gave ICE billions of dollars in their big, beautiful bill that ICE is using to continue doing what it's been doing anyway.

Right.

ICE has a lot of big, beautiful money, and that's why they've been able to keep operating.

And so Democrats are worried that if they agree to this deal, they're not getting anything, and that they've spent the last five or six weeks holding up TSA and accomplished nothing.

I think for Democrats who may ultimately agree to a deal, the direction that things have been going will be a big part of that.

For example, when Secretary Mullen was at his confirmation hearing, he said, yes, I would want to require...

ICE agents to get warrants when they're entering private homes.

That was a big deal for Democrats.

And it was something the White House hadn't yet conceded.

And I think there were a lot of Democrats who saw that as a sign that things were going to change with ICE and that things were going to change with the Department of Homeland Security.

And so even if they don't get everything that they're requesting, I think a lot of Democrats feel like they successfully drew attention to a major issue and they were able to extract some concessions.

The flip side of that is there are a lot of Democrats who look at the Trump administration and say, if we want anything concrete, we need it to be law because things could change at any moment.

My answer to that is yes and yes.

I think we are in a delicate situation here.

As much as the Senate's going to continue negotiating and there is an incentive for senators to reach a deal, both so that TSA agents get paid and so they can leave Washington,

There are a few factors that are going to make that complicated.