Trump Administration border czar Tom Homan assured that immigration raids will continue across the country despite the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is in its third day Monday with no sign of a funding deal in Congress.
Asked whether the shutdown would restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ability to continue operations, Homan responded that despite the lack of funds to pay agents, they will continue to enforce the heavy-handed immigration policy pushed by Trump.
ICE raids to continue despite partial DHS shutdown
“ICE officers won’t get paid, but they seem to be getting used to it. So no, the immigration mission, the reason President Trump was elected president, continues. We have the most secure border in the nation’s history. We have record numbers of arrests and deportations that will continue,” he told CNN.
The U.S. Senate failed on Thursday, February 12, to pass a Republican bill to fund DHS through September after nearly all Democrats blocked the measure on the grounds that it did not include sufficient limits on ICE operations, which have sparked protests and have so far resulted in the deaths of two Americans in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The scheduled recess in the two Republican-controlled chambers of Congress – among which there are also differences over whether to push for an annual or a stopgap funding proposal – could extend the shutdown of the agency, which employs more than 270,000 people, more than 90 percent of whom will remain active during this time.
This new partial shutdown, the second in February after a brief shutdown at the beginning of the month, will not affect the rest of the federal government, whose budget has already been approved until the end of the fiscal year. A previous total shutdown limited the Administration’s functions for a record 43 days between last October and November.
It will only include agencies under the DHS umbrella: ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Coast Guard, Secret Service, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), among others.
ICE has been the most visible face of Trump’s harsh anti-immigration policies in his second term, and the entity that has carried out, along with CBP, raids in Democratic-majority cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Despite the fact that the confrontation between Democrats and Republicans has this agency at its center, the million-dollar injection of funds through the budget and tax law promoted by the U.S. president gives DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ample freedom to reallocate the money dedicated to guaranteeing immigration operations.
Filed under: ICE raids shutdown DHS
With information from EFE
