House approves Senate bill to fund DHS and end record-setting 76-day shutdown

Washington — The House on Thursday unanimously approved a Senate-passed bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, a move that will soon end the 76-day shutdown that has left many critical agencies struggling to maintain operations and pay employees.

The chamber approved the bill by voice vote Thursday afternoon with little fanfare, a sign that lawmakers were finally ready to put the impasse behind them. The House’s action sends the legislation to President Trump’s desk, and the shutdown will end once he signs the bill into law.

The department has been shut down since Feb. 14, making it the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history. Democrats have objected to funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the two agencies under DHS that have led the charge on enforcing Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. 

The Senate unanimously passed legislation to fund the rest of DHS last month. But House Republicans rejected that plan, arguing that the bill would be caving to Democratic demands to defund the president’s immigration agenda.

Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and President Trump eventually coalesced around a plan to fund the entirety of DHS on two parallel tracks. The first would involve the House passing the Senate DHS bill to immediately reopen the department. The second involves funding ICE and Border Patrol through the budget reconciliation process, which will allow Republicans to approve a bill without support from Senate Democrats.

The president ordered DHS to redirect money to pay employees in March. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin warned that funding to make payroll would dry up by the beginning of May, increasing pressure on lawmakers to pass the Senate bill.

House leaders had been waiting for the reconciliation process to move forward before bringing up the Senate legislation. Both chambers took the first step toward crafting the reconciliation package this week, adopting a budget plan that instructs the relevant committees to write legislation to fund the immigration agencies.

“We held the homeland bill, the underlying funding bill, because we had to ensure that they could not isolate and eliminate those two critical agencies,” Johnson told reporters after Thursday’s vote. “We are getting those done now. We passed the resolution first. That was critically important for us to do, to ensure that we’re going to protect the homeland, even though Democrats are unwilling to do it. So now that that box is checked, we’re allowed then to proceed and go through with the rest of it.”

Mr. Trump has said he wants the reconciliation package on his desk by June 1. 

Both ICE and Border Patrol received tens of billions of dollars in funding in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, meaning their operations have continued mostly unimpeded during the shutdown. 

The brunt of the funding lapse has thus been felt by other DHS components like the Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency. Adm. Kevin Lunday, the commandant of the Coast Guard, told CBS News in an exclusive interview that his workforce was “furious” that the impasse had dragged on so long, calling it “incredibly frustrating.”