The White House spent the week projecting a willingness to negotiate over immigration enforcement policies while drawing a firm line against the central reforms Democrats say are needed to reach a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security — a posture that all but guaranteed a partial government shutdown this weekend.
The resulting standoff reflects a careful balancing act by the administration: demonstrate enough flexibility to avoid the appearance of intransigence, but concede nothing that would meaningfully limit President Donald Trump’s ability to carry out his signature mass deportation agenda.
“The administration is not going to accept concessions that meaningfully affect its ability to carry out its immigration enforcement agenda,” a senior White House official said, requesting anonymity to discuss private negotiations.
That line — delivered as the two sides headed toward a funding lapse that will leave Coast Guard members, FEMA employees and TSA screeners working without pay — captures the firmness behind what the White House has argued is a good-faith engagement. The official told reporters that the administration sent Democrats a counterproposal on Wednesday that included draft legislative text addressing some of their concerns, though the official declined to share specifics.
The effort at outreach marks a shift from the last shutdown, when the government closed for 43 days amid a debate over federal healthcare costs and the White House faced criticism for refusing to engage. This time, with public approval of Trump’s handling of immigration declining, the administration has been more willing to come to the table — if not to give much ground once there.
Democrats are demanding a series of reforms to immigration enforcement in the aftermath of the deaths of two Americans at the hands of immigration officers in Minnesota: a ban on agents wearing face masks, a body camera mandate and a requirement that officers obtain judicial warrants before entering residences.
The proposals have broad public support. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 61% of Americans say it’s “unacceptable” for officers to wear face coverings that hide their identities. An even greater majority, 72%, said agents should not be allowed to check individuals’ immigration status based on their appearance or accent.
Trump told reporters on Thursday that he opposed barring agents from wearing masks, citing a recent court ruling. “They have some things that are really very, very hard to approve, frankly,” he said of Democrats’ demands. “They want our law enforcement to be totally vulnerable, and put them in a lot of danger.”
The senior White House official described the question of judicial warrants as a particularly “very challenging” element of the negotiations — an indication that the administration views the warrant requirement as a direct threat to its enforcement operations, not merely a procedural inconvenience.
As of late Thursday, there had been no substantive discussions about the counterproposal. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., dismissed the White House’s offer as “not serious, plain and simple.”
The White House has sought to extract political value from the standoff even as it has tried to resolve it. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, accused Democrats on Fox News of “barreling our government towards another shutdown for political and partisan reasons.” And the agencies at the heart of the dispute — Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — will likely continue operating normally, drawing on funding from the reconciliation bill Republicans passed last year, which included significant money for the president’s immigration agenda. That insulates the administration’s core enforcement apparatus from the shutdown’s effects, even as other agencies bear the burden.
The administration has also tried to build goodwill through targeted concessions. Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem directed her agency to deploy body cameras to all federal agents in Minnesota in the aftermath of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. That controversial enforcement surge, known as “Operation Metro Surge,” which led to weekslong protests in the state, will conclude soon, according to White House border czar Tom Homan.
Noem has said she aims to expand the body camera program nationwide — a key Democratic demand — but that her department needs additional funding to do so, effectively folding the concession into the very spending fight that prompted the shutdown.
The gestures were not enough to prevent a lapse in funding. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., warned colleagues he could summon them back to Washington if negotiations advanced, but both he and Speaker Mike Johnson allowed lawmakers to depart Washington on Thursday — a signal that neither side expected a quick resolution.
Beginning Saturday, employees of the Coast Guard, FEMA and the TSA will work without pay, though it will be weeks before their first paycheck is missed. Immediate disruptions are expected to be limited, but a prolonged shutdown could hamper air travel and the government’s capacity to respond to natural disasters this winter.
“We’re going to leave town and close down DHS, FEMA, the Coast Guard, TSA workers, rather than have a conversation about putting into place the exact same things we expect of law enforcement throughout this country,” said House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, D-MA, on MS NOW’s The Weeknight.
— Emily Hung contributed to this article
Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.