By Richard Cowan, Nolan D. McCaskill and David Shepardson
March 27 (Reuters) – Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday rejected a bipartisan Senate compromise to end a six-week partial government shutdown, prolonging an impasse that has caused long security lines at U.S. airports during the busy spring break season.
With Congress again deadlocked, the White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump had declared an emergency and directed the Transportation Security Administration to begin paying its officers. The agency said its officers would start receiving paychecks as soon as Monday.
Instead of considering the Senate bill, which passed unanimously in the early morning hours, the House will vote on a temporary measure to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security at current levels for two months, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” Johnson told reporters on Friday afternoon.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Johnson’s proposed 60-day extension was “dead on arrival” in the Senate, where Democrats’ demands for limits on Trump’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement first prompted the shutdown. The Senate adjourned on Friday for a two-week recess.
“We’ve been clear from day one: Democrats will fund critical homeland security functions — but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Schumer said in a statement.
The Senate measure would have restored funding for most of the Department of Homeland Security, including airport security screeners, disaster-response workers and members of the U.S. Coast Guard, who have worked without pay since mid-February.
But the Senate bill does not address the underlying standoff over immigration. The bill specifically omitted funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, while also containing none of Democrats’ proposed restraints on immigration agents, such as barring agents from wearing masks and requiring body cameras.
The shutdown has led to long lines at U.S. airports, and many of the 50,000 security officers who have gone without pay have called in sick or resigned. Nearly 12% of TSA officers did not show up to work on Thursday, including more than a third of officers at New York’s JFK, Baltimore, Houston’s two airports and Atlanta.
Major disruptions and airport security lines of several hours or more were reported on Thursday and again on Friday.
Johnson said Republicans would not vote for any measure that would hurt immigration enforcement. House Democratic leaders called on Republicans to take up the Senate bill, asserting that they were preventing an end to “airport chaos.”
DEMOCRATS BLOCK DHS FUNDS AFTER US CITIZENS KILLED
Democrats, the minority party in both houses of the U.S. Congress, used what little leverage they have to block DHS funding after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. They are seeking to curb Trump’s immigration-enforcement push, which has resulted in more than half a million deportations and created chaos on the streets of U.S. cities.
Despite the shutdown, both ICE and Border Patrol are able to draw on separate funding from the sweeping tax and spending bill Republicans passed last year.
Republicans have suggested they will try to secure new funding on their own through a cumbersome procedure that would allow them to bypass Democratic opposition, though it is unclear whether the party can maintain enough unity in an election year to do so.
Locked out of power in Washington, Democrats have forced two government shutdowns in the past six months. Neither delivered the results they sought, as they failed to secure expiring health subsidies last November and came out of the latest standoff without a deal on immigration enforcement.
Still, Trump’s administration has backed off, at least for now, from the confrontational and at times violent tactics that sparked mass protests in Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities.
Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this month. Her successor, former Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin, has signaled support for some Democratic proposals, such as limiting the ability of agents to forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant.
Other Democratic proposals are likely dead in the water. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said their call for agents to operate without masks was a “nonstarter.”
“It’s not about reforming,” Homan said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. “It’s about crippling ICE. It’s about taking away their authorities.”
Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said Democrats had damaged Congress’ annual funding process, weakened national security, and set a precedent that they may come to regret.
“Democrats remained intransigent and unreasonable with their list of demands,” she said in a statement.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Nolan D. McCaskill, David Shepardson and Ted Hesson in Washington and Anusha Shah and Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Andy Sullivan, David Gregorio and Rosalba O’Brien)
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