Democrats Continue To Keep DHS Held Hostage, Reinforcing The Need To Eliminate Filibuster
March 16, 2026
It has been officially a month since Democrats forced the Department of Homeland Security into an indefinite shutdown, which began on Valentine’s Day, following a firestorm of Left-Wing media attacks targeting the agency over the conduct of several ICE agents carrying out a deportation raid.
Mass deportations, which was a central pillar of all three of President Trump’s campaign promises, was among the top issues on which the President ran in 2024, following the greatest border invasion in American history.
And though legacy media outfits might have you thinking the opposite, the policy of mass deportations remains widely popular and, indeed, commands bipartisan support.
Realizing that the policy has mass public support, the Democrats pivoted their approach to exploiting some bad optics surrounding the Alex Pretti incident and have used that as a weapon to hold Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration for ransom to their demands.
These demands serve effectively as a rash of policies (body camera requirements; deescalation training programs; requirements for judicial warrants) that would all but neuter Immigration and Customs Enforcement from practically being able to implement their mandate.
For their part, Republicans quite rightly have said that acquiescence to Democratic demands would be suicidal, both politically and for the country.
As a result, Democrats have countered with the offer that instead of funding the agency outright, they would opt to finance DHS piecemeal, with special appropriations packages tailored to non-immigration subagencies that fall under DHS’ purview, such as FEMA and TSA – the two agencies central to disaster management and transportation security, respectively.
Both Republicans and the White House have correctly pointed to the absurdity of this “compromise solution.”
First, there should be no need to reach a piecemeal funding package in the first place: the administration’s immigration policies (including the ones labeled “hardline” and spearheaded by Stephen Miller) are overwhelmingly backed by the public and are essential to maintaining the national security of the country, particularly at a time when overseas conflicts have heightened the risks – including dangers from international terrorism – at home.
Second, no other agency is funded in piecemeal. Since its inception, the Department of Homeland Security has included over twenty-five subagencies, each of which operate in collaboration with one another, the intelligence agencies, and Justice Department, to protect the homeland from foreign and domestic perils.
By selectively choosing one subagency to fund, because of a perception that the relevant agency, like FEMA, is less of a political lightning rod than ICE, for example, is grievously unwise.
Like a body, each subagency under Homeland Security functions as if it were a vital organ which can only operate at full capacity if the other subagencies also work at full capacity. Short of that, the whole apparatus breaks down.
One would never propose, for instance, funding only one branch of the military at the Department of War; or keeping Main Justice at DOJ open while starving the US Attorneys’ offices and Bureau of Prisons of mission critical resources.
That would be absurd. The component parts would not be able to function properly without the entire agency operating at full capacity. The example serves to underscore just how ridiculous is the Democrats’ plan to keep TSA functioning, while ICE and CBP suffer.
The “piecemeal plan” by the Democrats also reinforces the sinister ways by which they operate. Under the Biden regime, Homeland Security, led by Alejandro Mayorkas, was essentially defunded.
Mission critical duties, like the operations border patrol agents are tasked to manage, were made obsolete by an administration that outwardly despised the agency’s mandate to keep American citizens safe, while expelling unlawful, and in many cases, criminal aliens from the country.
Democrats believed that simply making a distinction between citizen and non-citizen was not just unlawful but immoral, somehow incompatible with American values.
That was how we ended up with over 20 million illegal aliens infiltrating the nation’s borders between 2021 and 2025, until Trump reclaimed the Oval Office and ended all illegal border crossings, a feat that persists to this day.
Even though they are no longer in power, Democratic leaders disagree just as much with the policy of border security despite losing a landslide race fewer than two years ago, driven primarily by this key issue.
But lacking the official capacity to make their dismay known with scandalously reckless policies such as open borders, Democrats have instead opted for more subtle tactics, like the piecemeal strategy mentioned above to reopen DHS.
Their goal is not simply to negotiate with their Republican counterparts in a fair and reasonable manner, but to opportunistically exploit a bad headline or two surrounding this all-important agency to keep DHS inoperative until they return to power.
At which point, Democrats, should they ever reclaim the Presidency, and, God forbid, one or both houses of Congress, would immediately propose legislation to permanently shutter all border enforcement federal agencies (and perhaps DHS entirely) for good.
This underscores the stakes: if Republicans capitulate now and, say, accede to demands to sever ICE funding from the rest of the DHS appropriations package, Democrats will in the future have even more political firepower to not only argue in favor of eliminating ICE and CBP, but could also justify their demands on the basis that those subagencies remained closed under a Republican presidency, and everything went well!
Meanwhile, as the weeks roll on, and as all this drama unfolds on Capitol Hill, TSA agents continue to miss paycheck after paycheck. Some have simply stopped showing up to work, while others have submitted formal resignations.
This has prompted sometimes hours-long wait times at some of the nation’s most populated airports. Overbooked and delayed flights cause massive backlogs, triggering shockwaves across mass transit systems nationwide.
The repercussions of these decisions affect the day-to-day lives of ordinary Americans: families of government workers go weeks, maybe months, without reliable pay; Americans traveling for business or recreation are forced to spend more time in airports and potentially be inconvenienced by significant delays that disrupt important critical engagements.
These negative externalities could pressure Democrats to relent to Republican demands. They could also crystallize the heightened political stakes that Republicans face, too.
With these disruptions, the coming midterms, the ongoing war in Iran, and the prospect of election integrity legislation in the Save America Act languishing on the docket, the mounting list of concerns should force Republican leadership to reconsider the filibuster.
The DHS fiasco is yet another reason, not that one was needed, to eliminate or at least modify the filibuster (and, for instance, return to the traditional filibuster that actually requires the one who invokes it to stand up and talk for hours) so that a simple majority can vote on these critical bills to advance the President’s agenda without deepening reputational injury to the administration.
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(@gothburz) 
