Bipartisan support in House is crucial for Senate’s DHS funding proposal
The Associated Press has some more details on the backdrop to the DHS funding deal:
Senators worked through the night on the deal that would fund much of the rest of the department, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard and TSA, but without funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as the Border Patrol.
The result was that the Democrats failed to win new limits on immigration enforcement, which has been all but unaffected by the department’s partial shutdown. That was because last year’s “big beautiful bill” that Donald Trump signed into law shoveled billions of dollars of extra funds to the DHS, including $75bn for ICE operations. As a result, immigration officers have been paid while staff at other subsidiary agencies like the TSA and Fema have not.
Bipartisan support is thought to be essential if the bill is to advance in the House, where conservative Republicans have criticized their own party’s proposals and are demanding full funding for ICE functions.
“We will fully fund ICE. That is what this fight is about,” said Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Missouri. “The border is closing. The next task is deportation.”
Key events
The Department of Homeland Security has said that members of the TSA’s National Deployment Force and security officers from other Texas airports are being sent to Houston, where about 40% of scheduled TSA officers haven’t come to work this week.
DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis told the Associated Press in a statement late on Thursday that Houston travelers have been “experiencing some of the worst wait times in TSA history”.
The staffing shortage has hit especially hard at Houston’s George Bush intercontinental airport, where officials warned that waits in security lines could again top four hours on Friday.
An update on the airport’s website said 32 security officers from the National Deployment Force, which sends reinforcement to understaffed US airports, were already helping open additional security lanes at George Bush International.
The largest pilots union is urging Congress to approve a deal to pay TSA officers before lawmakers leave Washington DC for their spring recess next week.
Capt Jason Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, told the Associated Press the TSA officers who “are expected to show up every day to keep America’s skies safe and secure” deserve to be paid.
These dedicated professionals will see their second zero dollar paycheck today.
They are still worrying about mortgages, childcare, keeping the lights on, yet they keep coming to work without being paid.
Iran’s response to the US proposal aimed at ending the war in the Middle East is expected later today, a source briefed on the matter has told Reuters.
Donald Trump and top White House officials have been told via interlocutors that Iran’s counter-proposal would probably arrive on Friday, the source said.
Iran had been reviewing the 15-point proposal, sent via Pakistan, that included demands ranging from dismantling Iran’s nuclear program to curbing its missile development and effectively handing over control of the strait of Hormuz, according to sources and reports.
An Iranian official told Reuters yesterday that senior officials had reviewed the proposal and felt it served only US and Israeli interests. But diplomacy had not ended, they added.
A reminder that my colleague Tom Ambrose is covering all the latest out of the Middle East here:
Shrai Popat
Even though the Senate’s latest DHS deal withheld funding for ICE and part of CBP, the push to secure immigration‑enforcement money later on hasn’t slowed. Republicans continue to float the potential of passing this, along with money for the administration’s military campaign against Iran and portions of the Save America Act, through reconciliation – a process that requires only a simple majority in the Senate.
Late Thursday, Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who chairs the budget committee, said that he will “proceed quickly and efficiently” to ensure “ICE and other vital functions of homeland security, as well as the US military and efforts to increase voter integrity, are Democrat-resistance proof”.
The hard-right House Freedom caucus has slammed the DHS funding deal, laying bear the obstacles its final passage.
The caucus is demanding a bill that includes voter ID provisions, and would fund the border patrol and ICE child sex-trafficking division.
“We can’t believe that the Senate abdicated its responsibility this morning of not funding the child sex-trafficking division of ICE, that they don’t didn’t fund the border patrol. I guess the Democrats want a wide open border,” the caucus’s chair, Andy Harris, a Republican representative from Maryland, told reporters.
“The only thing we’re going to support is adding that funding into the bill, adding voter ID, sending it back to the Senate, make them come back in and do their work. The bottom line is, this deal is bad for America.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter notes a remarkable exchange between Donald Trump and a female Fox News host.
It came in an interview on Thursday on Fox’s The Five when Dana Perino asked about the plight of ordinary Iranians in the current war. “Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? It’s upsetting,” she asked.
But as Stelter notes in this morning’s Reliable Sources column, the president seemed to have more pressing priorities to discuss – namely Perino’s appearance.
Saying he had knowledge about the issues Perino was concerned about, Trump said: “But first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower … You haven’t changed. You have not changed. Now, I’m not allowed to say this, it’s the end of my political career, but you may be even better looking 1774631053, OK. I don’t know what you’re doing …”
He never gets to addressing Perino’s question, Stelter notes, but pivoted to give some lurid depictions of Iranians killed in recent protests against the Islamic regime, including “women being shot right between the eyes” and people “bleeding from the brain badly”.
He then brought the conversation back to Fox: “You have so many great people. A couple of bad ones, but you can’t have everything.”
Bipartisan support in House is crucial for Senate’s DHS funding proposal
The Associated Press has some more details on the backdrop to the DHS funding deal:
Senators worked through the night on the deal that would fund much of the rest of the department, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard and TSA, but without funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as the Border Patrol.
The result was that the Democrats failed to win new limits on immigration enforcement, which has been all but unaffected by the department’s partial shutdown. That was because last year’s “big beautiful bill” that Donald Trump signed into law shoveled billions of dollars of extra funds to the DHS, including $75bn for ICE operations. As a result, immigration officers have been paid while staff at other subsidiary agencies like the TSA and Fema have not.
Bipartisan support is thought to be essential if the bill is to advance in the House, where conservative Republicans have criticized their own party’s proposals and are demanding full funding for ICE functions.
“We will fully fund ICE. That is what this fight is about,” said Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Missouri. “The border is closing. The next task is deportation.”
Iran-linked hackers claim to access Kash Patel’s personal emails
Iranian-linked hackers are claiming to have accessed the personal emails of FBI director Kash Patel.
The hacker group, which calls itself Handala Hack Team, posted pictures of the director and his purported résumé online, according to Reuters.
The group said on its website that Patel “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims”.
Reuters says a sample of the emails appears to show a mix of personal and work correspondence from between 2010 and 2019. A justice department spokesperson confirmed that Patel’s emails had been compromised and later said the sample appeared to be authentic. There was no immediate response from the FBI or the hackers.
Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, stressed “bipartisan consensus” behind the Senate DHS bill – but heaped all the blame on Democrats for being “intransigent and unreasonable” with their demands.
She wrote: “Over the past five weeks, Republicans have made repeated attempts to reach bipartisan consensus to reopen the department. Republicans offered proposals to expand the use of body-worn cameras; limit civil immigration enforcement in sensitive areas such as schools and hospitals; increase oversight of detention facilities; and implement visible officer identification.
“While Republicans worked in good faith to try to reach agreement, Democrats remained intransigent and unreasonable with their list of demands.”
Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic senator from Maryland, posted on X that the Republicans had finally bowed to what Democrats had been arguing for all along on DHS funding.
“This morning, after 42 days, Republicans finally agreed to what we’ve been proposing for weeks – funding TSA, FEMA, & the Coast Guard without giving another penny to Trump’s lawless ICE & Border Patrol operations,” he wrote in a social media post that attached a fuller statement.
The statement said Republicans had only relented after “worsening chaos at airports across the country and considerable hardship for unpaid federal workers … This funding agreement contains no funding for Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol – operations that have instilled fear in communities across the country, violated individuals’ constitutional rights on an unprecedented scale, and left US citizens dead.
“I will not support even one more dime for this administration’s out of control immigration agencies so long as their lawlessness and violence continues.”
Mike Johnson hits out at Democrats as he says House Republicans to consider next steps
With the House of Representatives set to consider the bill, speaker Mike Johnson has given his response, saying that Republican representatives will gather this morning to decide a way forward.
“We’re going to get all our members together and decide next steps this morning but I’ll tell you it’s infuriating that Democrats are willing to inflict pain on the American people simple so they can defund the agency responsible for removing criminal illegal aliens,” he said. “That’s what this is about. They just put it on display again that that’s what they’re for.”
Hegseth reportedly blocking promotion of two Black and two female army officers
Pete Hegseth is blocking the promotions of two Black and two female officers in the US army, according to the New York Times.
The paper reports that the defense secretary, who has frequently railed against “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion”) policies and supposed “wokeness” in the armed forces has struck the four, all said to be one-star generals, from a list of prospective promotions in what is described as a highly unusual move.
Several senior military officers are said to have questioned whether the four are being singled out because of their color or gender.
Hegseth reportedly struck their names from the promotions list after unsuccessfully pressing the army secretary, Dan Driscoll, to do so. Driscoll had resisted, citing the officers’ decades-long records of exemplary service. It is unclear if Hegseth has the legal authority to excise the promotions.
The list is currently with the White House, which is expected to send it to the Senate for final approval. Most of the names on the list are white, although some Black and female officers remain.
JD Vance is emerging as the White House point man in ending the war with Iran
Axios reports that the vice-president is taking on what it calls “the most important assignment of his career” – crafting an end to a war that he had long warned against waging.
He is expected to be the lead negotiator in peace talks, the report says, having held multiple conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, met Gulf allies and participated in indirect communications with the Iranians.
Vance’s gradual re-emergence comes after he adopted an almost subterranean profile in the early stages of the conflict, fueling conclusions in some quarters that he had been humiliated. He has since come out publicly in support of Trump’s mantra that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.
The president gave an official imprimatur to Vance’s new role in Thursday’s cabinet meeting, calling on him to give an update on Iran, and noting that he was working with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s usual lead negotiator, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. It is Witkoff that suggested the vice-president spearhead the current process.
One interesting nugget in the Axios peace is the belief among Vance’s advisers that some figures in the Israeli leadership are trying to undermine him, believing him to be “insufficiently hawkish”.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio is in Paris today for a meeting of G7 foreign ministers where the US-Israeli war on Iran is the main focus.
The UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Japan are wary of being dragged into the confrontation. The G7 foreign ministers are also discussing how to end the war in Ukraine.
On his way to France, Rubio told reporters it was in the “interest” of the G7 to help the US reopen the strait of Hormuz. But in a combative statement, he said he was not “interested” in making the US allies “happy”.
I don’t work for France or Germany or Japan. I get along with all of them on a personal level and we work with those governments very carefully. But the people I’m interested in making happy are the people of the United States. I work for them.
