Immigration fight could trigger shutdown at end of next week

Senators in both parties are warning that a political food fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security could cause a partisan government shutdown this month by derailing a second tranche of spending bills that Congress needs to pass by March 22.

Congress came within hours of a partial shutdown last week before it managed to pass a package of six largely noncontroversial spending bills before the Friday deadline.

But lawmakers say the next package of bills, which would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), State and Homeland Security (DHS) as well as foreign operations, will be a much heavier lift because of deep partisan divisions over President Biden’s immigration policy.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told The Hill on Tuesday that the DHS funding bill is “the most challenging one,” an assessment shared by other senators.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said “Homeland is absolutely the toughest” of the bunch but pointed out all of them are getting weighed down by fights over policy riders being pushed by House conservatives.

“You got Defense in there,” she noted. “Labor, HHS is not an easy account either, but nobody’s talking about that. We’re all talking about Homeland and how challenging that’s going to be.”

Murkowski said DHS funding is “snarled up” with demands for the Biden administration to continue construction of a border wall and adopt the Trump-era policy of requiring migrants to “remain in Mexico” while their asylum claims get processed in the United States.

House Republicans are also pushing to zero out Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s salary; to prohibit funding for the CBP One app, which the Biden administration has used to parole migrants into the country; and to defund memos limiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection enforcement operations.

Murkowski floated the possibility of separating the appropriations bill funding Homeland Security from the rest of the package to avoid a broader government shutdown after March 22.

“I think you may have a situation where you could bifurcate this whole thing. If Homeland could not be resolved, you could move through those we have agreement on so that they’re at least in a better place process-wise, and then we deal with Homeland differently,” she said.

Sources familiar with the negotiations say that House Republicans are insisting on a variety of immigration-related policy riders that are unacceptable to Senate Democrats. There’s also a fight over how to spend billions of dollars that would be newly allocated to Mayorkas to deal with the huge surge of migrants across the southern border.

“It’s a big mess,” said a Senate Republican aide about the impasse over the Homeland Security funding measure. “It could jeopardize the larger package.”

A Senate Democratic source familiar with the negotiations between Senate and House appropriators said that House Republicans don’t want to greenlight the billions of dollars in new funding allocated to the Biden administration to handle the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming across the border.

“The Republicans wanted a lot more money in the allocations” for the Department of Homeland Security, but “now they don’t want to spend it because it might make things better, and they don’t want to make things better.”

“They want policy riders on everything,” the source added.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the chair of the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, broadly corroborated that claim without discussing any of the details inside the negotiating room.

“I think we’ve plainly seen that Republicans do not want to fix the problem at the border. I think their focus is very clearly on keeping this a pretty big mess. Their priorities on the border are political, not practical,” he said.

Murphy noted the increase in the “allocation for Homeland [Security] is much more significant” than the increases for any other appropriations subcommittee.

“That’s in part because there are enormous emergency expenses that the Biden administration has had to pay out over the past year” due to the number of migrants crossing the border, which exceeded 300,000 people in December alone, he said.

He confirmed there are many policy riders under discussion, declaring: “This will be the hardest bill to finish.”

Senators say the tentative plan is to unveil legislative text of the second funding package by Sunday evening, which would give House lawmakers and senators enough time to review it and pass it by the March 22 deadline.

One alternative option would be to separate the Homeland Security bill and pass a stopgap funding measure to keep the Homeland Security Department and its agencies operating beyond the deadline while passing a full-year appropriations package for the departments of Defense, Labor and HHS and other less controversial priorities.

Or congressional leaders could opt to pass a broader funding stopgap postponing the March 22 deadline for all departments and agencies covered by the second tranche of appropriations bills until sometime in April.

Both chambers are scheduled to take an extended recess beginning March 23.

Lawmakers would want to avoid setting a new funding deadline on March 29, which is Good Friday.

They need to wrap up the full-year appropriations bills by April 30 to avoid triggering an across-the-board 1 percent funding cut that would impact all discretionary spending programs.

The 1-percent cut is required by law to take effect after April 30 if Congress hasn’t passed all of its regular appropriations bills by that date. The penalty was a concession to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) included in last year’s bipartisan deal to raise the debt limit.

Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) warned that failing to get all of the spending bills passed in time to avoid the cut would be a “disaster.”

“It’s unclear how [the Office of Management and Budget] would interpret that if it’s just one bill” that doesn’t pass “and it gets a [continuing resolution],” she said.

Collins confirmed that Homeland Security funding looms as the biggest obstacle to getting the second funding package passed.

“Immigration, border security are difficult issues as we’ve shown earlier this year,” she said, pointing to the collapse of a bipartisan Senate border security deal last month.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday pleaded with colleagues not to stumble into a shutdown because of disagreements over border security. 

“It’s a difficult issue,” he acknowledged. “But we have to get it done. We don’t want to shut down the government. It’s going to cause huge problems for everybody, including our military, including our veterans, including so many other people.”