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The Department of Homeland Security entered a partial shutdown at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, February 14, 2026. Airport security screeners kept working without paychecks. FEMA disaster recovery payments stalled. Coast Guard personnel deployed on unpaid orders. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents? They kept arresting people, filling detention beds, and processing deportations.
Senate Democrats blocked immediate funding for DHS, with negotiations ongoing and no settled timeline for resolution. They wanted specific constraints on ICE operations—including body cameras, warrant requirements, detention time limits, and bans on operations at schools and hospitals. Republicans refused. Congress then left town for a week-long recess, ensuring it runs at least through that period before anyone can vote on a resolution.
Democrats can’t leverage the thing they’re fighting about. The operations they want to constrain keep running. The services that shut down—airport security, disaster relief, maritime rescue—are the ones with broad public support that have nothing to do with the dispute.
Multi-Year Appropriations for ICE Operations
Republicans structured immigration enforcement funding as multi-year appropriations rather than annual appropriations that expire every September 30th. This gave ICE and CBP enough to operate for multiple years, protected from Congress’s yearly budget negotiations.
The Trump administration’s first term showed how appropriations fights could stall initiatives when Congress controlled the funds year by year. This time, Republicans made sure that wouldn’t happen.
ICE employees continue working. They’re not getting paychecks—those require annual appropriations that lapsed—but they have operational funds. They can execute arrests. They can transport detainees. They can charter deportation flights. The accounts for all of that were filled last year.
Compare that to FEMA, where thousands of employees are furloughed and disaster recovery payments to states have stopped. Or TSA and the Coast Guard, where personnel maintain operations on unpaid orders. Those agencies depend on annual appropriations. When Congress doesn’t pass a budget, their accounts run dry.
Excepted Employees Without Pay
The government classifies employees as “excepted” based on whether their work protects life or property. Nearly every ICE employee counts as excepted. Agents, detention officers, deportation coordinators—they all keep working. The legal theory is that operations protect national security and public safety.
But excepted doesn’t mean paid. It means required to work with no compensation until Congress restores appropriations. An ICE agent in Minneapolis with a mortgage due next week? Still working. Still not getting paid.
TSA screeners face perhaps the cruelest version of this arrangement. They’re classified as excepted because airports can’t function with no screening. But they’re among the lowest-paid federal employees, often living paycheck to paycheck.
The Coast Guard’s personnel—the only military service branch under a civilian department—face a different version of the same problem. They’re military. They deploy on orders. But unlike the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, which get Defense Department funding, they get DHS funding. When DHS shuts down, personnel work with no pay while conducting search-and-rescue operations, maritime patrols, and drug interdiction missions. They’re required to work. They’re not allowed to quit. And they’re not getting paid.
Private Detention Continues at Full Capacity
CoreCivic and GEO Group are among the major private operators of immigration detention facilities. When the shutdown started, those contracts didn’t stop. The companies keep operating facilities, keep staffing them, keep receiving payment—because their contracts were signed using the multi-year appropriation.
A Venezuelan national detained at CoreCivic’s Dilley facility in Texas experiences no change. The facility doesn’t scale down operations. Medical services continue at whatever level existed before. Legal access continues at the same restricted level it’s always been, despite recent federal court orders requiring meaningful attorney access. The detainee population keeps experiencing the conditions documented in lawsuits: overcrowding, limited medical care, restricted communication with lawyers.
Federal facilities tell a different story. Federal officers keep working with no pay. Support staff get furloughed. The facility’s ability to coordinate attorney visits, schedule phone calls, and maintain communication systems degrades. But the building stays open. Detainees stay detained.
ICE headquarters legal counsel—the office responsible for ensuring detention and removal decisions comply with due process—is furloughed or operating at skeleton capacity. Local ICE commanders make decisions with less oversight from headquarters. Decisions happen with less internal legal scrutiny, particularly in marginal cases where legal review might flag constitutional questions.
Why Democrats’ Leverage Strategy Fails
Democrats’ traditional strategy depends on creating enough public pressure—through disabled services and unpaid workers—that Republicans agree to negotiate. This one doesn’t work that way.
The service at the center of the dispute keeps running. The services that shut down are the ones with broad public support: airport security, disaster response, maritime rescue. Democrats are blocking appropriations bills that would fund TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard because the bills don’t constrain ICE. But ICE doesn’t need the bills—it already has funding. So Democrats are shutting down popular services to fight for constraints on an agency that keeps operating anyway.
The political asymmetry gets worse the longer this continues. TSA call-in rates increase as officers face financial hardship. Airport delays worsen. FEMA disaster recovery payments stall, affecting states waiting for reimbursement. Coast Guard training stops. All of that creates visible problems that Republicans can blame on Democratic obstruction.
Meanwhile, ICE operations continue. Facilities stay full. Deportation flights keep departing. Why would Republicans negotiate when operations continue and Democrats absorb the political cost?
What Democrats Are Demanding
Democrats want constraints on ICE operations—the kind of constraints that police departments in major cities operate under routinely: body cameras, identification requirements, warrant standards, limits on how long someone can be held with no court review.
The White House offered limited concessions. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that federal law officers in Minneapolis would deploy body cameras. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons later acknowledged that despite this announcement, nearly 80 percent of ICE agents nationwide still lack cameras. The Trump administration announced the drawdown of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota—a tactical retreat from the specific operation that triggered the crisis, not a systemic constraint.
These moves didn’t substantially narrow the gap because they’re administrative measures, not rules written into law that survive even when new leaders take over. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer emphasized the problem: with no legislative guardrails, “the actions of the administration could be reversed tomorrow on a whim.” Executive policy changes last until the executive changes policy. Democrats want statutory language in appropriations bills—permanent requirements that persist across administrations and can’t be reversed by memo.
Republicans characterize those requirements as constraints on “operational discretion” that would hamper effectiveness. Requiring warrants hampers the ability to enter homes with no warrants, and requiring court review hampers the ability to detain people indefinitely with no court review. The constraints would make operations harder. That’s the point.
Congress’s Constitutional Power Over Spending
The framers gave Congress “the Power of the Purse” specifically to constrain executive power. The Constitution says Congress controls all federal spending. The design was intentional: if the executive branch needs funds to operate, and Congress controls the funds, then Congress can control executive operations by controlling spending.
That theory assumed annual appropriations. It assumed Congress would approve spending year by year, maintaining leverage over executive agencies through the recurring need for budget authority.
Multi-year appropriations break that model. When Congress gives an agency multiple years of funding at once, it surrenders its leverage for those years. The executive branch, armed with guaranteed funds, becomes protected from Congress’s yearly budget negotiations.
Congress’s main way to control what the president does—threatening to withhold funding—doesn’t work against agencies with multi-year appropriations. Democrats can shut down TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. They can’t shut down ICE.
This isn’t an accident or an oversight. It’s the deliberate result of how Republicans structured immigration enforcement funding. They learned from the first Trump administration that appropriations battles could stall initiatives. So they gave ICE and CBP enough to operate for years, regardless of what future Congresses might do.
If this model works—if multi-year appropriations successfully insulate executive agencies from congressional budget leverage—then expect it to become the template for other executive priorities. Whenever the party controlling the presidency gains budget authority, structure it as multi-year funding. Lock in executive discretion. Reduce congressional leverage.
Congress gradually loses its ability to control federal spending, the mechanism the framers designed to prevent executive overreach. And it’s happening through the budget process itself, which makes it hard to challenge and harder to reverse.
Possible Outcomes
Congress returns from recess on February 23. That’s nine days—long enough to create real financial hardship for unpaid workers, long enough to degrade TSA operations and stall disaster recovery, but probably not long enough to force either side to capitulate.
The State of the Union is scheduled for February 24, which adds political pressure for resolution but probably not enough to bridge the fundamental gap. Democrats want statutory constraints on ICE. Republicans want to preserve operational discretion. Those positions haven’t moved substantially since it started.
One path forward: Democrats accept weaker constraints than they initially demanded, allowing it to resolve on terms that Republicans characterize as meaningful reform but that preserve most ICE operational discretion. That would follow the pattern of previous resolutions, where the side with less leverage eventually accepts a deal that falls short of their goals.
Another path: extended standoff that resolves only when the political cost to both sides forces compromise. That’s what happened in 2018-2019, when a 35-day impasse ended with a temporary bill that gave neither side what they wanted.
A third path: skip the budget negotiations and pass a separate law imposing statutory constraints on ICE independent of appropriations. That faces its own obstacles—the Senate filibuster, limited Republican support, potential presidential veto. But it represents one way to resolve the structural problem that multi-year appropriations create.
TSA call-in rates will increase. Airport delays will worsen. Disaster recovery will stall. Coast Guard personnel will face mounting financial pressure. Eventually, something breaks.
The question is whether what breaks is Democrats’ resolve to constrain ICE, Republicans’ willingness to accept constraints, or the constitutional architecture that’s supposed to give Congress leverage over executive power. ICE keeps running. The system stays full. Operations continue. And Congress, armed with the power of the purse that’s supposed to constrain executive action, discovers that power doesn’t work when the executive already has the funds.
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