House Republicans cave and back Senate plan to end DHS shutdown

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Apr 1, 2026

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House Republicans caved to pressure Wednesday and agreed with the Senate to pass a partial funding bill to end the Department of Homeland Security government shutdown that spawned chaos at airports.

Reversing his previous stance, House Speaker Mike Johnson agreed to push for passage of the bipartisan Senate bill that funds DHS agencies excluding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, which would result in airport security and other DHS workers being paid as usual.

GOP leaders in both chambers would then push to pass a separate bill to fund those agencies using a process called reconciliation that requires only a simple majority and could be passed with only Republican votes.

“Republicans in the Senate and House will be following through on the president’s directive by fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security on two parallel tracks: through the appropriations process and through the reconciliation process,” Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in a joint statement.

Johnson had derided the Senate bill just last week as a “joke” and said GOP senators could not have read it.

The deal has the approval of Trump, though just days ago he trashed it as “inappropriate.”

“We are going forward to fund our incredible ICE Agents and Border Patrol through a process that doesn’t need Radical Left Democrat votes, and bypasses the Senate Filibuster,” Trump wrote on his social media site.

There was no immediate response from Democrats but the Senate already approved the first funding bill and Democratic leaders in the House suggested it would win widespread approval in the House if it were brought to a vote.

The agreement, if it sticks, amounts to a major climbdown for Johnson and right-wing House Republicans, who insisted they wouldn’t vote to fund DHS without including immigration crackdown.

Passing the reconciliation bill may not be a slam dunk, as Republicans hold only tiny minorities in both chambers. Some Republicans may seek to force inclusion of unrelated GOP priorities like Trump’s proposed restrictions on voting.

House Republicans aggressively pushed back against the Senate deal last week and jammed through their own bill that funded all of DHS, including ICE and Border Patrol. That measure was doomed in the Senate, where Democrats can block most bills except those under reconciliation.

After the GOP vs. GOP clash, Trump ordered DHS to pay airport security screeners who had been going without paychecks since the shutdown started in February.

That move, which some say is legally dubious, ended the immediate crisis caused by hours-long lines at airport checkpoints. But it left no obvious path to resolving the wider standoff over DHS funding.

Democrats blocked funding for all of DHS in hopes of negotiating guard rails to Trump’s immigration crackdown that led to the killing of two U.S. citizen protesters in Minneapolis.

But negotiators remain far apart on any deal on demands for reforms like ICE agents ditching masks, getting warrants to enter private homes and businesses, and independent investigations of alleged wrongdoing like the killings.

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