The top congressional Democrats appear to have mended their rift over the controversial Homeland Security spending bill and presented a revamped list of demands to earn the party’s support to fund the agency.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., presented a unified front on Wednesday to unveil a retooled wish list of reforms for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the top House Democrat bucked his colleague’s deal with President Donald Trump.
“We’re united as House and Senate Democrats,” Schumer said. “We’re going to have tough, strong legislation. We hope to have it within the next 24 hours that we will submit together. And then we want our Republican colleagues to finally get serious about this.”
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Schumer laid out congressional Democrats’ requirements for their support of a full-year DHS funding bill, which varied little from the same list of demands he unveiled last week. The only difference now is that he had a buy-in from House Democrats.
Among the demands are an end to roving patrols, oversight by state and local governments where ICE and DHS are operating, along with the right to sue. Lastly, Schumer demanded that there be “no secret police.”
“I find it amazing that the Speaker of the House, [is] saying… they should be allowed to have masks,” Schumer said. “This group, which needs to be identified more than any other group, should have a standard much more lenient and hidden than other police forces?”
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“I would bet when Speaker Johnson goes down to Louisiana, the sheriffs and the police deputies are well identified as they are in almost every city,” he continued.
Jeffries spurned Schumer and Senate Democrats just a day earlier when he and the vast majority of House Democrats rejected the funding deal that the top Senate Democrat struck with Trump that allowed Congress more time to negotiate over the DHS funding bill.
That divide, for now, appears to have been bridged.
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The negotiations over the funding bill are expected to largely take place in the Senate, and Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will negotiate in good faith, given that they abandoned an already bipartisan bill and Jeffries’ defection from Schumer over the Trump-backed spending deal.
But Democrats argue that their demands aren’t too burdensome, and should be accomplished with legislation, not through executive action at the White House.
“These are just some of the commonsense proposals that the American people clearly would like to see in terms of the dramatic changes that are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before there is a full-year appropriations bill,” Jeffries said.
