Fetterman bucks Democrats, says party put politics over country in DHS shutdown standoff

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the lone Senate Democrat to join the GOP to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), accused his colleagues of choosing party over country in their shutdown vote.

Senate Democrats dug their heels in against funding the agency on Thursday in their pursuit of stringent reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), following the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good during immigration operations in Minnesota.

But Fetterman believed that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his party were missing the point.

‘This shutdown literally has zero impact on ICE functionality,’ Fetterman said in a post on X. ‘Country over party is refusing to hit the entire Department of Homeland Security. Democracy demands a way forward to reform ICE without damaging our critical national security agencies.’

Senate Democrats’ refusal to fund DHS this week has made a partial government shutdown affecting only DHS inevitable. The deadline to strike a deal is midnight Friday, and the likelihood of that happening is nearly nonexistent.

That’s because both chambers of Congress quickly fled Washington, D.C., on Thursday, with many in the upper chamber leaving the country altogether for the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

Schumer and his caucus argued that the White House and Republicans weren’t serious about reforms to ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and contended that the GOP’s counteroffer to their own list of demands didn’t go far enough to earn their votes.

But to Fetterman’s point, shutting down DHS won’t halt the cash flow to immigration operations.

That’s because congressional Republicans last year injected roughly $75 billion into the agency for ICE with President Donald Trump’s marquee ‘big, beautiful bill.’ That money is spread across the next four years, meaning that a shutdown now will have little, if any, effect on ICE’s core functions.

But other functions under DHS’ purview, like TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and more, will experience the brunt of the partial shutdown.

Negotiations on striking a deal are expected to continue in the background, and Senate Democrats have signaled that they’re considering offering a counteroffer to the White House in response to the GOP proposal.

Still, a vote to reopen and fund the agency won’t happen until early next week at best.