The Senate and the White House are suddenly in the middle of the most serious political crisis of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The deadly shootings this month by federal agents of two Minneapolis residents — Renee Good and, on Saturday, Alex Pretti — have sparked a nationwide furor that’s causing even some Hill Republicans to call for a full investigation and congressional hearings.
It’s also less than a week before the deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security and several other major departments and agencies, including the Pentagon. A partial government shutdown would begin on Friday night if the impasse isn’t resolved.
Saturday’s horrific shooting — and the Trump administration’s handling of the aftermath — galvanized Senate Democrats, who quickly united on a strategy to block the six-bill FY2026 funding package unless the DHS funding, which includes ICE, is stripped out and renegotiated. This would require the House to vote again. And that’s a serious problem since the chamber is on recess all week.
A big shift? House and Senate Democrats want fundamental changes to how ICE operates in cities around the country. Trump and top administration officials have, up until now, shown few signs of changing course in his nationwide immigration crackdown.
However, Trump told the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey Sunday night that the Pretti shooting will be reviewed and the Minnesota-focused ICE surge will end “at some point.” Inside the administration, there’s a stark realization that the Minneapolis shootings have been catastrophic politically, and they’re losing ground on an issue that Republicans have dominated.
“At some point we will leave,” Trump said of the huge ICE operation in Minnesota, which began in the wake of a massive welfare scandal involving Somali-affiliated organizations. “We’ve done, they’ve done a phenomenal job,” Trump added.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are pressing ahead with the six-bill funding package — for now.
Yet Senate Democrats are even more steel-spined than they were during the fall’s record-setting government shutdown. Democrats believe pushing back against Trump’s increasingly harsh immigration crackdown is a winning position that most of the nation will agree with.
“I didn’t think anything could unite us more than health care did. I was wrong,” a Democratic senator told us after a caucus-wide conference call Sunday night.
In a sign of the shifting dynamics, the White House and Senate Republicans have reached out to Senate Democratic leaders in an attempt to head off another shutdown. Democrats say the GOP has yet to offer any acceptable solutions.
In Democrats’ view, the Senate can pass everything else and renegotiate DHS. Remember that the One Big Beautiful Bill included tens of billions of dollars for DHS anyway, so ICE is flush with cash. However, a DHS shutdown would impact FEMA and the Coast Guard as well.
It’s too early to say how this new impasse could play out. Trump is calling for Congress to end “sanctuary cities” via legislation, something that isn’t going anywhere in the Senate.
The real issue right now is that Democrats aren’t going to vote for DHS funding in any form. So even a short-term stopgap funding bill that includes DHS is probably out of the question.
Importantly, this larger funding package also has billions of dollars in earmarks for lawmakers from both parties and chambers. Additionally, beyond DHS, the five other FY2026 bills include tons of Democratic priorities, especially on the domestic side. No one wants to let this massive bill stall.
The real challenge is the clock. The Senate is in session today for procedural reasons, but the snow has pushed the first votes of the week to Tuesday. Without a time agreement, the initial procedural vote on the funding package wouldn’t be until Thursday.
The House is out of session until Feb. 2 — three days after the funding deadline. If the Senate does anything other than pass the six-bill package as-is — which is extremely unlikely — the measure would need to go back to the House.
A time agreement is necessary in the Senate to pass any version of the package before Friday, which gives Democrats even more leverage.
One option is to demand votes on whether to retain each individual title of the bill. In this scenario, if all 47 Democrats vote to scrap the DHS funding bill, GOP votes would be needed to do so. At this point, it’s not clear that there’d be any. Even the Republicans who have expressed concern about Saturday’s shooting haven’t gone as far as calling for the DHS funding to be separated out and renegotiated.
Inside Dems’ rapid shift. Consider how quickly things changed. Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was saying there wouldn’t be a shutdown and that the bipartisan funding negotiations were going well. Seven Democrats voted for DHS funding in the House despite massive pressure from the party base.
Even as of Friday, when several Senate Democrats had already come out in opposition to the DHS funding bill, leadership aides in both parties believed Republicans would be able to pick off enough Democrats to pass the funding package.
We mention all of this to underscore how different this shutdown fight is from the last one. Democrats spent months laying the groundwork for the October-November shutdown to make it all about health care.
For this one, Democrats are messaging around it on the fly. Senate Democrats united quickly behind the hardline strategy. Even Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Angus King (I-Maine), who loathe shutdowns and broke from the caucus on the last one, support Schumer’s stance.
The House. House Republican leaders haven’t considered bringing the chamber back into session. What you’ll hear from Republican leaders is that they have done their job and the Senate needs to pass their bill.
