Michelle Hackman

Democrats are pretty uniformly against the SAVE Act, and Republicans are not uniformly for it.

And you know the way the Senate math works is that they need 60 votes to pass legislation.

They barely even have 50 votes right now.

As of, you know, Tuesday morning, Democrats, Republicans, and the White House were sort of zeroing in on this deal that's not perfect for anyone, as deals often are.

Basically what it does is it funds all of DHS except the part of ICE that is responsible for the stuff that you and I know ICE to do, basically arresting and deporting immigrants.

Exactly.

You nailed it.

I would say on the margins, but really the big thing to know is that ICE has so much money sloshing around from the Big Beautiful Bill that it doesn't really matter to them.

And you saw Republicans—I mean, Republicans had this really interesting rhetorical shift where—

For weeks, they were talking about the importance of funding ICE.

We can't leave ICE hanging.

ICE is so important.

To suddenly, yesterday, you had John Thune and others saying, we pre-funded ICE.

Like, that was so smart of us.

We gave them all the money they need, and we can actually move ahead without getting them any more money.

You know, as a policy reporter in Washington, I've learned to never make really confident guesses.

Right.

But there's a really strong pressure on Congress to try to get this solved before they go on their two-week recess on Friday.

It's such an interesting moment for ICE.

You know, we have reported that Trump was pretty unhappy with how DHS handled the huge operation in Minneapolis, that he feels that some of ICE's operations just went too far, looked bad, made him look bad.