Don’t Look Now, But Dems Are Winning the DHS-Funding FightWhether they’ll recognize it as a victory is another question.
If you’re stressed out at work this week, console yourself that you’re handling it a bit better than Justice Department attorney Julie Le, who told a Minnesota federal judge yesterday she’s been so overwhelmed by the immigration-related habeas corpus motions assigned to her that she’d like to be held in contempt just so she could get some sleep. “The system sucks,” she said, according to local news. “This job sucks.” That’s something we can all agree on. Happy Wednesday.
Time to Play Hardballby Andrew Egger All last year, conventional wisdom among the Democratic base was that the party’s political leaders are feckless cardboard cutouts unable to mount an effective opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarian advance. But as congressional Democrats navigate a spending fight over the Department of Homeland Security this week, the end result is shaping up to be just the opposite—even if the naysaying has persisted. The fight is going about as well as anyone could have hoped. Yesterday, the House passed a spending bill reopening the government after a few days of partial shutdown. The bill funds the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, State, and Treasury until this fall. The Department of Homeland Security, however, is funded only for an additional two weeks under the package. To some progressives, even this is an intolerable concession. Speaking ahead of the vote, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) summed up the line of thought: “Not only should ICE receive NO funding, it should be abolished.” Should ICE be abolished? That’s a policy fight Democrats will get to have among themselves if they’re lucky enough to win unified control of government in the next few years. But the idea that it is an achievable policy aim in the immediate term is a fantasy. Shutting down the government for enormous periods of time might be good for raising public awareness of a given issue, but it doesn’t magically create consensus for your view. Democrats’ shutdown play last year couldn’t even squeeze Republicans into reinstating a status-quo Obamacare subsidy; the idea that they’d have better luck vaporizing ICE is ridiculous. The cherry on top is that even shutting down the government indefinitely wouldn’t starve ICE of funds, given the gobs of cash already appropriated for the agency by last year’s Big Beautiful Bill. But Democrats do have an advantage they never had with the subsidy fight: widespread squeamishness among elected Republicans about the way DHS is conducting its business. Republican leaders had hoped to whisk DHS funding quickly and unobtrusively into law by pairing it with a host of other 2026 appropriations bills. But thanks to a number of defections within their own party, they were forced to strip DHS out of the package. Democrats, in the end, got about the closest thing to an ideal set up: the appropriations bills they did end up passing include policies that seemed utterly unachievable during the heydays of DOGE. There’s increased funding for NIH, global HIV programs, federal K-12 school programs, and more. There’s also specific funding levels outlined in these bills, which are meant to protect against future administration efforts to claw back the money through executive actions or rescissions. On top of all that, Democrats will now get the fight they should want: a hardball negotiation over DHS funding alone. The asks that House and Senate Democrats are making for this fight are not insignificant. Chuck Schumer laid them out last week: They want to see an end to ICE’s most openly lawless enforcement practices, including invading homes without judicial warrants and conducting aimless roving enforcement sweeps. They want a “uniform code of conduct and accountability” enforced by independent investigators. And they want to ban masks and compel body cameras on immigration officers. If it were up to me, I’d add one more demand: Any DHS deal should allocate a pile of money for new immigration judges. One of the more quietly ridiculous components of this administration’s immigration agenda has been its deliberate refusal to address the immigration-court backlog, the actual source of so many of our preexisting immigration-enforcement problems. Instead of fixing the problem, Republicans have tried to use our shortage of immigration judges as an excuse to cut judges out of the process entirely: “Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant—an additional warrant—to go and apprehend people who we know are here illegally,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday. “How much time would that take? We don’t have enough judges. We don’t have enough time.” Well, here, Democrats should say: Let us help you out in this department. This is not like the last shutdown fight. Democrats aren’t just trying to raise public awareness of this issue, or cultivate some goodwill among their base by demonstrating their willingness to fight, or move the Overton window closer to their ideal ICE legislation for some indeterminate point in the future. ICE is terrorizing America’s streets right now. Democrats have the ability and the leverage to play hardball for some of these reforms right now. A win is right there for the taking—if they don’t decide to call it a loss. What was it that convinced Democrats in Congress they had leverage and could fight? Share your ideas in the comments. In Springfield, Relief Arrives—but Fear Remains Central Christian Church Senior Pastor Carl Ruby and scenes from Springfield, Ohio (Photos by Jim Swift) by Jim Swift Springfield, Ohio Last fall, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked TPS for Haitians, effective 11:59 p.m. on February 3. “This decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary” an anonymous DHS spokesman said at the time. The Trump administration claimed that “the environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home.” The nonenvironmental situation is still, well, awful. The State Department’s advice regarding Haiti is “Do Not Travel” due to “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.” At the local library, I page through the local Sunday edition of the Springfield News-Sun, which features a red pullquote in all caps: “EVERYONE IS WORRIED.”
Jean Joseph, a 52-year-old from Port-au-Prince, told the paper through a translator that he has no plans to return to Haiti: “If we have to go back to Haiti and die, so be it.” Monday’s ruling from federal Ana Reyes, a U.S. district judge for the District of D.C., stayed Noem’s revocation of Haiti’s protected status. But make no mistake: Springfield, though happy for the temporary respite, is still worried. I reached out to Carl Ruby, senior pastor of the Central Christian Church in Springfield and a leader in the local effort to help the Haitian community, to ask him what people are thinking, feeling, and planning. I quickly got the sense from our conversation that his life has been nonstop interviews—he’s quick to offer a quote, maybe just to get me off the line so he can get back to work. When I tell him I’m in town, he pauses, gives me the church’s address, and invites me over to talk in person. When I arrive, I see Central Christian is prepared to offer sanctuary to the Haitians residing here under TPS: piles of fresh diapers, air mattresses, and other supplies are at the ready. Fresh off a call, maybe with another reporter, Ruby turns to me and dives into a story. The previous Sunday, a woman in her forties arrived, panicked that she was going to be separated from her 7-year-old daughter. “All they have is each other,” Ruby said. The woman suffered a stroke during communion, losing all feeling in her left side. “The doctor said it looked like a response to stress.” That 7-year-old girl could have been the next Liam Ramos, a scared little kid separated from her parent by the government. And in a way, for a brief time, she was. Down the road in Yellow Springs, a woman reached out to Ruby, wanting to help. He told her the church could use donations, and after putting out the call to her neighbors, the Good Samaritan ultimately needed a U-Haul van and several cars, a caravan of care, to get all the supplies—including a washing machine and a new refrigerator—from her house to the church. Rosena Jean Louis, owner of Rose Goute Creole Restaurant (which has excellent ragou), told the News-Sun that in the days leading up to the announced end of TPS, her business was down 60 percent. Where did everyone go? Ruby says, “I don’t think people have left. I think they’re afraid to come out. People are afraid to be seen at Haitian businesses. They’re afraid ICE is going to catch them there.” “Today could have been one of the worst days in our city’s history,” Ruby says, reflecting on how the immigrants have revitalized what was once another mid-sized Ohio city in decline. “In the last couple of years, three thousand new homes have been built, are being built, or are in the planning stages. . . . That hasn’t happened here in half a century.” But that revitalization stopped—even before Noem’s decision to kick out all the Haitians. Ruby relays some data he heard from an affiliate of the local chamber of commerce: “We typically get 20 to 21 inquiries a year from businesses looking for a place to locate. We have not had a single one since the ‘cats and dogs’ comment,” he says, referring to the false claims President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance spread during the 2024 campaign about Haitian immigrants supposedly eating pets. “If Haitians are deported,” Ruby says, “it will set Springfield back fifty years.” Ruby would like Trump or Vance (who grew up nearby) to come visit: “We would love to show him how Haitians are making America great right here in Springfield,” he says, straightfaced. He’s not being cute; he really means it. I asked Ruby how people can help this community that escaped a natural disaster in Haiti only to find a political disaster here? The Haitian Support Center is probably the best place to start, Ruby told me. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsTHE LAPDOG SPEAKS: More alarm bells keep ringing about Republicans’ plans for the midterms. Asked to comment yesterday on Trump’s call for the GOP to “nationalize” elections, House Speaker Mike Johnson chose to spread baseless conspiracies about the outcome of the 2024 election: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost.” “It looks on its face to be fraudulent,” the speaker went on. “Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream. But we need more confidence in the American people in the election system . . . Everybody, no matter what party you’re in, should agree with that.” We agree with Johnson that cratering confidence in U.S. elections should worry us all. But the prime culprit behind it isn’t any structural deficiency in our voting systems. It’s the constant barrage of lies that any Democratic victory is inherently suspicious and rigged—pushed by Trump, abetted by spineless lackeys like Johnson. THE CHANGE YOU CAN’T SEE: We don’t want to overstate it, but it’s clear by now there’s a significant ICE enforcement change underway in Minneapolis, with the faction favoring broad, indiscriminate sweeps losing out, for the time being, to the faction favoring a more restrained policy of targeted enforcement—going after specific aliens with criminal histories, or at least criminal charges. Some of that internal disagreement dates back months. In September emails obtained this week by NBC News, Greg Bovino—the Border Patrol “commander” now ousted from the Minneapolis operation—discussed ICE acting director Todd Lyons’s attempts to curtail his aggressive approach to enforcement. “Mr. Lyons seemed intent that CBP conduct targeted operations for at least two weeks before transitioning to full scale immigration enforcement. I declined his suggestion. . . . Mr. Lyons said he was in charge, and I corrected him saying I report to Corey Lewandowski.”¹ This new approach can be easy to miss for a few reasons. The first is that DHS spokespersons have consistently advanced the lie that all Minneapolis operations were targeted all along. The second is that it’s hard to believe that the new-look avatars of “restraint,” like White House border czar Tom Homan (remember that Cava bag of cash?), might really function as the adults in the room. And third, a change in ICE’s tactics toward migrants doesn’t necessarily include a change in its tactics toward protesters; as Andrew wrote this week, insane interactions keep piling up in that department, too. Still, one thing seems to be true: Resistance and political blowback in Minnesota have brought concrete change to ICE’s enforcement philosophy. If a goal of these protests is to protect minority Minnesotans from the predations of pretextual arrest and brutality at the hands of a hyper-zealous and anonymous federal force, that’s a real win. JEANINE PIRRO, GUN GRABBER?: U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro enraged a key segment of the Republican base in a Fox News appearance in which she threatened gun owners with arrest. On Monday, Pirro took credit for D.C.’s three-week stretch without homicides, then vowed to keep guns out of the city: “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else,” she told Martha MacCallum. “You bring a gun into this district, count on going to jail and hope you get the gun back.” That stung the Second Amendment crowd, who see the District’s punishing gun laws as a constant irritant. Gun organizations and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed Pirro, while Kyle Rittenhouse called for her firing. Pirro recorded a hostage video–like apology on Tuesday, insisting to angry gun owners that she wasn’t talking about them. “You’re responsible, you follow the laws?” Pirro said. “You’re not going to have a problem with me!” —Will Sommer Cheap Shots
1 The email is also the latest reminder of the apparently accepted fact within DHS that agency directors are outranked by the unpaid “special government employee” who is both Kristi Noem’s reported off-book squeeze and her off-book chief of staff. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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