Miles Parks

But what Republicans have put on the table for most of this week is a funding deal that would include money for DHS, but exclude money for enforcement and removal operations.

This unit within ICE that deals with some of the policy changes that Democrats are asking for.

But the catch is that Democrats say they are not going to fund ICE at all without these reforms that they have been pushing for.

What they're concerned about is that if you even fund part of ICE, that the administration could simply move some money around from other parts of that agency and use it for enforcement and removal.

Yeah, Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement some $75 billion last summer as part of the party line One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Republicans passed.

And so yeah, there is limits to what Congress can do to rein in ICE because they don't have that leverage while ICE still has plenty of funding to work with.

So unlike those TSA officers, ICE agents are getting paid.

And we saw this week the Trump administration deploy them to airports, actually, to assist TSA officers in some limited capacities as these lines start to strangle travel at some airports.

Well, President Trump is one reason that we have seen so much whiplash over the state of dealmaking this week.

After it seemed like the president had agreed to Senate Republicans' plan to get this funding flowing again,

He then came out and said that he would not accept any deal unless it also included the strict voter ID law and voting overhaul that he's been pushing for, known as the Save America Act.

He said that these two things had to be welded together.

Now, later, Senate Republicans came up with a workaround that, you know, maybe they could do that Save America Act later as part of another party line reconciliation bill that would not require Democratic buy-in.

But Trump has not yet publicly endorsed that plan.

And so there is some ambiguity on how much the president is willing to back a funding bill that does not deal with this voting overhaul that he has been really pressing for.

Yeah.

And Miles, I saw a clip on social media from a reporter that talked to one traveler at an airport waiting in a really long line who wasn't blaming Democrats or blaming Republicans, but was saying, fire them all.

And I think that gets to some of this frustration more broadly with the Congress that has refused to act.

in many spaces.

And again, this is the third shutdown in just the last couple of months.