White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that President Donald Trump wants Congress to end their two-week vacation and finally reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Congress left for vacation on Friday and is not expected to return until April 13, even though DHS has remained shut down for 45 days. Leavitt told Politico’s Dasha Burns that Trump is urging the vacation to end so that both chambers can pass a bill to fully fund DHS.
“The president is also encouraging Congress to come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely,” Leavitt said.
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The Senate unanimously approved funding for DHS on Friday without including funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and some of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). House Speaker Mike Johnson called the Senate’s plan a “joke,” and other House Republicans remained unsatisfied with the upper chamber’s version of the funding bill.
Senate Democrats voted for the partial shutdown on Feb. 14 while they issued a list of demands for immigration reform, which included prohibiting ICE agents from racial profiling or entering property without a warrant. The demands were in response to the immigration enforcement-related killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, while they retaliated against ICE operations in January.
The shutdown caused hundreds of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents to quit their jobs after working for weeks without a paycheck. Trump signed an executive order on Friday mandating that TSA agents be paid while the shutdown continued. He also deployed ICE agents to major airports to help TSA agents during the shortage.
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck said Monday that Trump needed to use his executive authority and order Congress to reconvene during “extraordinary occasions.”
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