GOP sources see Trump shifting to back Senate bill funding most of DHS

Senate Republican sources expect President Trump to get behind a Senate-passed bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but not Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, ending a tense standoff with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that threatens to prolong a partial government shutdown for weeks.

Several Republican sources briefed on conversations with the White House say they expect Trump to endorse the Senate bill, even though it doesn’t fund ICE, as the quickest way to end the shutdown and begin work on a second budget reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement and possibly the Pentagon as well.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) spoke to Trump on Monday to figure out a way through the impasse with House Republicans.

Sources cautioned that while Trump is now open to endorsing the Senate bill, which would give Johnson the green light to bring it to the House floor, he could change his mind.

“There’s a lot of pressure on Thune to figure out what our plan is on DHS,” a Senate GOP aide said. “The base is losing their mind. We’ve got to do something.”

The source said the White House is reconsidering its embrace of a House-passed two-month stopgap to fund all of the DHS, given that Senate Democrats have vowed to block it. The House passed that stopgap Friday.

Trump has called on lawmakers to come back to Washington from the two-week Easter recess to get the Homeland Security Department funded as soon as possible.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday that the president has “repeatedly” called on Congress to reconvene. 

She said the president has said “he’ll host a big Easter dinner here at the White House if Congress will come back and fight the Democrats on this issue, which we should do, because, again, [the] Democrat Party is in the wrong here.”

Senate Republicans have forced Democrats to vote seven times against a House-passed Homeland Security funding bill that would also fund immigration enforcement, but Senate GOP strategists believe that continuing to pound that message is having diminished political returns.

Several other Senate GOP sources confirmed that Trump is expected to pivot to the Senate bill after speaking to Thune on Monday and getting briefed on the advantages of moving swiftly to a targeted budget reconciliation bill to boost ICE and Border Patrol funding — and possibly enact elements of the SAVE America Act as well.

But sources cautioned that Trump could embrace a new strategy if he decides backing the House bill would cause too much of a problem with base GOP voters.

Asked if it would be helpful if Trump were to encourage the Speaker and House Republicans to schedule a vote on the Senate-passed Homeland Security funding bill, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said, “Those are the kinds of things that we’re working on.”

Trump’s intervention would end the awkward standoff between Johnson and Thune, who put together the deal to swiftly pass the legislation to fund the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Pressing House Republicans to put the Senate-passed bill on the floor will require persuading Johnson to back off his fiery rhetoric from Friday, when he declared there’s no way that Republicans would support any legislation that could be framed as defunding ICE.

“The Republicans are not going to be part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” Johnson said at a news conference Friday.

Johnson is telling members of the House GOP conference that the House is “definitely not passing the Senate bill,” according to a person briefed on one lawmaker’s conversation with the Speaker.

Senate Republicans are quick to point out that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July, provided four years of funding to ICE and Border Patrol. They say that they could move quickly to begin work on a budget reconciliation package to provide more money for immigration enforcement.

They also note that Senate Democrats have already rejected proposals to fund all of the DHS for a shorter period of time to give negotiators more time to attempt to reach a deal on reforms to ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

Republican senators had laid out these arguments to Trump last week, and sources familiar with their conversations said that Trump indicated at the time that he would support the Senate strategy of passing a bill to fund as much of the Homeland Security Department as possible through the regular appropriations process and then boosting ICE and Border Patrol through budget reconciliation.

One Senate GOP aide said Trump “pivoted” from Thursday to Friday after seeing the furious reaction to the Senate bill from House Republicans and the GOP base.

“I think Trump was on board with this until he saw the House reject it and then the base go nuts,” the aide said. “No one pivots better than Donald Trump.”

Thune has argued that funding large chunks of the DHS through a regular appropriations bill will make it much easier to increase ICE and Border Patrol in a budget reconciliation package, which could be passed with a simple-majority vote

Rachel Snyderman, a budget expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that trying to fund appropriations for multiple agencies through the budget reconciliation process to get around a Senate filibuster would be complicated.

“You’re adding complexity because you’re bringing in additional committees, additional stakeholders. DHS is almost like a Swiss army knife of agencies and bureaus that all have very different activities in support of the same singular mission,” she said.

Trump has urged Senate Republicans to terminate the Senate filibuster by setting a new precedent with a majority vote, but Senate GOP aides say there are only about eight certain “yes” votes for doing that and at most 20 Republican senators who would be open to exploring that option.

Now that the heated Republican reaction to the Senate bill has subsided, Senate Republican leaders are making another bid to get Trump back on board with their strategy from last week.

A Republican strategist said that House Republicans reacted so angrily to the Senate-passed DHS bill on Friday because they felt that their Senate GOP colleagues had blindsided them.

“I think at the end of the day [the House] may end up taking what the Senate passed,” said the strategist.

“There’s just intense frustration [among House Republicans] with how the Senate Republicans managed themselves. The lack of communication between the House and Senate is always bad but it was particularly egregious in this instance. So they were like F you, and they could because TSA was funded,” the strategist added.

Trump announced Thursday that he would sign an executive order to pay TSA workers during the Homeland Security shutdown, giving House Republicans more leeway to reject the Senate bill.

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