The Democrats are making a major stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforcing immigration law by doing a soft shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
If only that would actually affect ICE — as the usual voice of sanity on the left, Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, pointed out.
On Thursday, as The Associated Press noted, both the House and Senate left town for a 10-day break without funding DHS.
The Democrats, the AP said, “want curbs on President Donald Trump’s broad campaign of immigration enforcement” and “demanded better identification for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement officers, a new code of conduct for those agencies and more use of judicial warrants, among other requests.”
Trump, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that the Democrats’ demands would be “very, very hard to approve.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, meanwhile, said that his party’s proposals would represent “an end to the chaos.”
“The White House and congressional Republicans must listen and deliver,” Schumer said.
Except that it won’t do anything of note, as Fetterman noted on social media.
In a video he posted Thursday evening, Fetterman noted that ICE still has $75 billion in funding, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill. That’s not the part that a soft DHS shutdown will affect.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency? That’ll be affected. Transportation Security Agency? That too. And not only that:
Shutting DHS down has zero impact and zero changes for ICE.
ICE already has $75B in funding from the BBB that I did not vote for.
But it will hit FEMA, Coast Guard, TSA and our Cybersecurity Agency.
As a Democrat, I can’t vote to shut down critical parts of our government. pic.twitter.com/QYasx0LwCo
— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) February 12, 2026
Which is, you know, accurate.
“The impact of a DHS shutdown is likely to be minimal at first. It would not likely block any of the immigration enforcement operations, as Trump’s tax and spending cut bill passed last year gave ICE about $75 billion to expand detention capacity and bolster enforcement operations,” the AP noted.
“But the other agencies in the department — including the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard — could take a bigger hit over time.”
So, in other words, in order to stop ICE from enforcing immigration law and to end activist rioters from causing “chaos,” you have to wait longer on TSA lines and stop FEMA from responding to emergencies during winter storm season. Nice work.
And what’s worse is that basically, both sides are resigning themselves to a relatively lengthy DHS soft shutdown, with Politico reporting ” the soonest any resolution would be reached is in the political hothouse around Trump’s State of the Union address on Feb. 24.
“The lack of progress has even raised the prospect that Trump’s speech to Congress might be postponed, and some Democrats are mulling a boycott,” the outlet noted.
“This ‘nyah nyah’ is going to go on for a while,” GOP Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said, adding that if there was a deal between the White House and Democrat leadership, “I’m not entirely convinced that anybody would vote for it.
“I can’t see the Dems voting for anything because they’re not going to get pounded for funding ICE. And the Republicans on my side are not going to get pounded for hurting ICE.”
And for right now, that’s not who’s going to be hurt. Fetterman is pointing out what will become too obvious to ignore: Far from hobbling the immigration-enforcement apparatus, the Democrats are inconveniencing us all and putting people in danger to get their way.
These aren’t the priorities of sane people. Yet again, the Democrats should be listening to the last voice of sanity remaining, the last Joe Manchin type remaining in their party. Which means, almost certainly, they’ll do anything but.
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