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Demonstrators protest Department of Homeland Security assigning ICE agents to work alongside TSA agents at O'Hare International Airport on March 27, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. The travel disruptions continue as hundreds of TSA agents quit or work without pay during a partial government shutdown. U.S. President Donald Trump said ICE agents will be deployed to U.S. airports on Monday, with border czar Tom Homan in charge of the effort.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
DHS Shutdown Becomes Democrats’ Leverage to Curb ICE Tactics after Minnesota Deaths
Mar 28, 2026
WASHINGTON – For more than a month, Democrats have refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security while demanding that the agency limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in ten specific ways after federal agents killed two people during federal immigration operations in Minnesota in January.
“We will not continue to allow what we’re seeing on the streets. Thousands of Americans, of immigrants, of our neighbors from Chicago to Minneapolis are saying ‘enough is enough,’” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.
Democrats’ push for immigration enforcement reform has fueled a funding standoff on Capitol Hill that triggered a partial shutdown of DHS in mid-February after lawmakers failed to reach a funding agreement. The shutdown followed their dispute over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including the January deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Amid the backlash, President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from Minnesota and sent border czar Tom Homan to lead immigration enforcement, who later announced the wind down of the operation, but also stressed support for Trump’s goal of widespread deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“We are not surrendering the President’s mission on a mass deportation operation. If you are in the country illegally, if we find you, we’ll deport you,” Homan said at a press conference in Minneapolis last month.
On Capitol Hill, the budget standoff raised a broader question about whether Democrats can realistically use the DHS funding fight to force changes to federal immigration enforcement while Republicans control Congress.
Democratic leaders have made 10 demands in the DHS funding bill to restrict ICE officers’ aggressive tactics as a condition for funding Homeland Security. The demands include removing face coverings, identifying themselves during operations, and less aggressive force standards.
“They have the leverage to withhold the funding, so the issue is what do you do with it?”
Georgetown Law School supervising attorney Sophia Genovese told Medill News Service.
Genovese pointed to the shutdown in the fall when Republicans entered the negotiations expecting Democrats to eventually concede, and Democrats ultimately agreed to a deal without securing the policy changes they had demanded.
She said her concern is that if Republicans hold out long enough again, public attention could fade and Democrats could face similar pressure to fold.
“The public strongly supports this. This is an issue that’s going to keep coming up,” Genovese said. “But the fear is if they’re going to capitulate and fold and continue to allow this crisis to occur again.”
In recent months, Democrats have also introduced a series of bills to advance their push for ICE accountability.
At a news conference in February, Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Reps. Andrea Salinas, D-Ore. and Derek Tran, D-Calif., introduced the “ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act”, which would allow individuals to seek civil damages if U.S. Customs and Border Protection or ICE officers violate their rights.
Rep. Salinas criticized Trump’s 2025 budget bill that awarded more than $170 billion towards border and interior enforcement, and said the legislation would check ICE and CBP by targeting funds from the 2025 budget bill and using those funds to compensate victims.
“Without accountability, there are no consequences. And without consequences, they will keep violating the Constitution,” Salinas said.
That same month, Rep. Ramirez introduced the “Melt ICE Act”, a bill that would end funding for immigration detention and enforcement under DHS and redirect the money to community services. She said continued funding for DHS fuels human suffering and called for abolishing ICE.
“It must be dismantled piece by piece, and we need something new, a system that actually honors our rights, a system based on dignity, humanity,” Ramirez said.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said he hopes Democrats can secure significant reforms to ICE's operations, but he is skeptical that Trump will support meaningful change and would instead veto the bills.
“He’s had a very bad policy. He’s the person who appointed Noem during the rampage in Minneapolis, and he’s really politicized the whole issue so I don’t think he has confidence in reasonable reform,” Welch told Medill News Service. “ICE should be subject to all of the same standards in training, engagement, and warrants that apply to police enforcement in every community across the country.”
Genovese said the proposed legislation falls into several categories, including bills aimed at shrinking the immigration enforcement system and reducing deportations, measures that seek to reform agents’ conduct without limiting enforcement, and others she said would have little practical impact.
“Are all of these bills feeding into an overall reduction of the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement apparatus, or are these pieces of legislation just simple appeasements for the public? And so that’s something the Democrats need to think critically about,” Genovese said.
Genovese argued that even some Republicans are beginning to recognize the need for limits on immigration enforcement.
“They are disappointed with the immigration enforcement actions they are seeing,” Genovese said. “Even if not every single bill passes, I think Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to get some of these bills passed.”
Indeed, in March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced two days of sharp questioning from Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees over her leadership and the administration’s immigration crackdown.
“What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said heatedly to Noem. “We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong. It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”
Soon after the hearing, Trump fired Noem as homeland security secretary and nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., as her replacement.
Rep. Ramirez told Medill News Service that both parties must ask whether they are standing up for their constituents, the rule of law, and the Constitution, and to take action without making excuses or delaying the work.
“Are they going to continue to make excuses and not have a spine and allow Donald Trump to continue to terrorize their communities? So I think it's really important that right now, we're building the case to be able to actually ‘melt ICE’,” Ramirez said.
Gloria Ngwa is a Journalism and Psychology Student at Northwestern University.
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U.S. President Donald Trump signs a bipartisan bill to stop the flow of opioids into the United States in the Oval Office of the White House on January 10, 2018 in Washington, DC
Getty Images, Pool
Two Bills to Become Law; Lots of Ongoing Work
Mar 25, 2026
Two Bills to Become Law
These two bills have passed both the Senate and the House and now go to the President for signing, or, if he remembers his empty threat from the week before last, go to the President to sit for 10 days excluding Sundays at which time they will become law anyway.
- S. 1884: Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025, which will prohibit certain non-merits-based defenses against returning relevant artwork, passed the House by voice vote so no recorded vote exists.
- S. 3971: Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act, which will extend some small business related programs, passed 345-41.
Recorded Votes
These bills have only passed the House, so they are not going to become law anytime soon.
- H.R. 4294: MAWS Act of 2026, which would direct the Secretary of Commerce to establish a pilot program with respect to the sale of blue catfish caught within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, passed 320-66.
- H.R. 1958: Deporting Fraudsters Act of 2026, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to clarify that aliens who have been convicted of defrauding the United States Government or the unlawful receipt of public benefits are inadmissible and deportable even though existing law covers this category of crime in nearly every case, passed 231-186.
- H.R. 4638: Federal Working Animal Protection Act, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide that an alien who has been convicted of harming animals used in law enforcement is inadmissible and deportable even though existing law covers this issue, passed 228-190.
- H.R. 556: Protecting Access for Hunters and Anglers Act, which would prohibit the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture from prohibiting the use of lead ammunition or tackle on certain Federal land or water under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture, passed 215-202.
Legislative Appropriations Recap from the First Branch Forecast
Our colleagues at the First Branch Forecast have been tracking the legislative appropriations process so you don't have to: Recap.
The bottom line is that the legislative branch needs vastly more appropriations than it's likely to give itself and the damage to the functionality of legislative branch will continue to accrue, possibly to a breaking point.
Legislator Updates
- Wall Street Journal report on the record number of members leaving Congress.
- NOTUS report on an AI company co-owned by Rep. Swalwell (D-CA14).
- NOTUS report on Congressional wealth.
Continuing Business
- The House Oversight Committee has formally subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi for a closed session on Jeffrey Epstein.
- The House received a classified briefing on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in advance of a vote next month to renew Section 702.
- DHS remains shut down as neither party has moved from its demands of the other.
Two Bills to Become Law; Lots of Ongoing Work was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.
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U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) testifies during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 18, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Confirmation on Easy Mode: Sen. Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS
Mar 24, 2026
Since arriving in Congress in 2013 Sen. Markwayne Mullin has been known for disappearing for a few weeks to Afghanistan in a putative effort to rescue Americans still there after withdrawal and tried to draw the president of the Teamsters into a fight during a hearing. Ironically, or possibly appropriately, Sean O’Brien, that same president of the Teamsters, endorsed Mullin’s nomination. He has written several laws supporting Native American communities and pediatric cancer research. A Trump loyalist, on January 6, 2021 in the hours after the riot at the Capitol, Mullin voted to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by omitting Arizona and Pennsylvania’s votes for Joe Biden.
His work experience prior to his political career was primarily in running his family’s plumbing business after his father became ill. He spent four months as a mixed martial arts fighter with a record of three wins. (He’s also gotten a lot richer while in Congress.)
Now he’s awaiting confirmation in the Senate to be President Trump’s next Secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration agencies, FEMA, TSA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the cybersecurity agency CISA. (Outgoing DHS secretary Kirsti Noem was fired by Trump in the aftermath of the immigration agencies killing two Minnesota citizens at protests, and DHS is fiscally shut-down while Democrats are demanding immigration agency reform.)
How have nominees been vetted in the past?
In general, under other administrations, nominees had to go through a rigorous background check process focusing on taxes, personal and organizational affiliations, any legal issues and family issues. Nominees have had to fill out an SF-86, a form that allows for security clearances. This standard was already weakened in the first Trump Administration when Trump ordered his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to be given security clearance despite issues with his SF-86 form, and in the second Trump Administration the vetting process has been slimmed down even further. Nominees also respond to detailed questions in writing from senators on the committee handling the nomination.
Committee Hearing and Vote
March 18th’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Mullin’s nomination had three separate tracks.
Most of the GOP senators focused on the fact that DHS remains unfunded 30+ days after its last funding ended.
Sen. Paul (R-KY), the committee chair, took a different tack: he said that Mullin’s approving comments about Paul’s 2017 attack from a neighbor showed that Mullin was a bad choice for an agency that has been notable for its aggressive use of force since the start of the current administration. Also in the course of their back and forth, Mullin claimed that dueling was legal. It’s murder, actually.
(In its earlier years, Congress was a pretty violent place. Legislators often attacked each other physically and in 1838 Rep. Graves killed Rep. Cilley in a duel!)
The third track, coming primarily from Sen. Peters (D-MI), challenged Mullin on his tendency to embellish facts. This track ended up going in a different direction than was perhaps expected. Peters was asking about comments Mullin had made suggesting he had been in combat, yet Mullin has never served in the military in any capacity.
Mullin’s response was that it was related to a “classified” trip he took while serving in the House which involved some kind of very difficult training. Something was wrong with the story: the House does not have the power to classify secrets since classification is a power of the president. Mullin tried to refuse to provide any more information to the senators, but Sen. Paul called his bluff and asked for details to be provided in a room meant for classified topics, called a SCIF. When they came out, Sen. Lankford (R-OK) said that Mullin’s trip was about a whistleblower and was covered by a non-disclosure agreement, not classification. This whole thing was extremely unusual.
A nominee to lead an agency with substantial law enforcement powers and some national security responsibilities who doesn’t know the difference between classification and a non-disclosure agreement, favors violent resolution to disputes (and thinks it’s legal), and tries to avoid actually answering questions about things he brought up himself might have been disqualifying in the past. It’s obviously not anymore.
In the end, Mullin’s performance made no difference. Thursday, March 19, the committee voted to send his nomination to the Senate floor. Sen. Paul was the only Republican voting no, but Sen. Fetterman (D-PA) voted yes, as both had indicated they would in advance, which was enough to pass the committee. Mullin will be approved by the full Senate sometime next week probably. Whether he gets any votes besides Fetterman’s from the Democrats is currently unknown. All Republicans except Paul are expected to vote yes, and that will be enough.
Confirmation on Easy Mode: Sen. Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS was originally published on GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
Amy West is the GovTrack research and communications manager.
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A deep dive into the growing uncertainty in the U.S. legal immigration system, exploring policy shifts, backlogs, and how procedural instability is reshaping the promise of lawful immigration.
Getty Images, Halfpoint Images
When Immigration Rules Keep Changing, the System Stops Working
Mar 23, 2026
For generations, the United States has framed legal immigration as a kind of social contract. Since 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended the national-origin quota system, the U.S. has formally opened legal immigration to people from around the world without racial or national-origin preferences. If people from across the globe sought to reunite with family or bring needed skills to the American economy, they were told they would be welcomed. If they sought U.S. citizenship, the country would provide a clear route to reach it.
Follow the procedures, submit the forms, pay the fees, pass the background checks, and your time will come. Legal immigration has never been easy or quick. But the promise has always been that the path exists.
For decades, that process has been central to the country’s immigration narrative. The paperwork is complex, the wait is long, and the costs can be substantial, but the underlying premise has been simple. Follow the rules and the system will eventually produce an answer.
Increasingly, that premise is breaking down.
Across multiple visa categories and legal statuses, immigrants who have spent years navigating the formal process are finding themselves caught in an environment of shifting policies, administrative pauses, reversals, and uncertainty. The problem is no longer just that the process is slow. Instead, the process itself is becoming opaque.
For many applicants, the financial commitment alone is substantial. Filing fees, required medical exams, document translations, and legal assistance can easily exceed $5,000 over the course of an application. Families often structure their lives around these timelines. Job offers, housing decisions, schooling for children, and long-term financial planning are frequently tied to expected milestones in the immigration process.
When those milestones suddenly move or disappear, the consequences ripple outward.
Part of the challenge is sheer scale. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services currently carries a backlog of more than 8 million pending cases across the immigration system. Even when policies are stable, that backlog means applicants often wait years for decisions on visas, work authorization, and green card petitions.
But the backlog alone does not explain the growing uncertainty. In recent months, policy shifts and administrative pauses have created additional instability for people already navigating the legal process.
One example came in December when the State Department paused visa processing for applicants from dozens of countries. The pause was presented as a security review, but for families and employers already waiting in line, it created immediate uncertainty. Applicants who had already submitted paperwork, paid fees, and waited months for interviews suddenly found themselves stuck without any clear timeline for when the process would resume.
For many applicants already inside the system, the most immediate impact is the loss of the ability to work legally. When immigration processing pauses or policies change midstream, employment authorization tied to those applications often lapses while cases remain unresolved. People who followed the rules, paid the required fees, and maintained a valid status can suddenly find themselves unable to continue working in jobs they already hold, whether running a small business, repairing cars, or writing software, simply because the process they relied on has stalled.
The consequences are not abstract. Families who have structured their lives around the expectation of lawful employment can lose their primary source of income overnight. Rent, mortgages, and school tuition do not pause simply because an immigration application does. Employers face sudden disruptions as well, losing workers they have already hired and trained, even though the underlying immigration case is still pending.
For the people involved, it surely feels like the rules changed halfway through the process, because they did. They entered the system under one set of expectations, complied with every requirement, and waited in line as instructed. Then the process stopped moving.
In this environment, even basic questions become difficult to answer. Can someone continue working while waiting for a decision? Should a family keep paying legal fees to pursue an application if the policy framework may shift again? Is a delay temporary, or does it signal a deeper structural change in the program itself? And these days, if someone seeking permanent resident status makes the wrong decision on any of these - whether due to acts of omission or commission - it can result in the family members being placed on an ICE list of people targeted for deportation.
But the broader issue is institutional credibility.
A functioning system requires more than rules written on paper. It requires confidence that those rules will remain stable long enough for participants to act on them. When the framework shifts repeatedly, sometimes affecting people who have already invested years and resources in the process, it creates the perception that compliance offers no clear advantage. If individuals follow established procedures, the institutions administering those procedures will behave in a consistent and predictable way. When that expectation erodes, participation itself becomes riskier. Applicants begin to wonder whether the rules they follow today will still apply tomorrow.
None of this means immigration policy cannot change. Democracies revise laws and regulations in response to elections, court decisions, and evolving public priorities. Immigration policy in particular has always reflected political debate about how many newcomers the country should admit and under what conditions.
But there is an important difference between policy change and procedural instability.
Policy change establishes new rules going forward. Procedural instability alters the environment for people who are already in the system, often after they have invested significant time, money, and personal planning in reliance on the existing framework.
The result is a system that begins to resemble a moving target rather than a structured queue.
At a moment when immigration remains deeply contentious in American politics, restoring clarity to legal pathways would serve multiple purposes. Supporters of immigration reform often argue that expanding lawful avenues reduces pressure on unauthorized migration. Critics frequently emphasize the importance of enforcing existing rules.
Both arguments depend on the same foundation. A legal process must function consistently enough for people to trust it.
Without that consistency, the debate risks losing a critical distinction between lawful participation and rule breaking. When the system itself becomes unpredictable, the promise that following the rules will lead where you want them to begins to lose meaning.
Once that promise weakens, rebuilding confidence in the system becomes far more difficult than maintaining it in the first place. Or perhaps an uneven system with stops and starts that frustrates the people in it so much that they no longer want to be here is an intentional message being sent by those in charge.
Brent McKenzie is a writer and educator based in the United States. He is the creator of Idiots & Charlatans, a watchdog-style website focused on democratic values and climate change. He previously taught in Brussels and has spent the majority of his professional career in educational publishing.
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