Gluesenkamp Perez Statement on DHS Funding Vote

Resources / Press Share on Gluesenkamp Perez Statement on DHS Funding Vote May 03, 2026 Press This week, Congress ended the longest shutdown of any federal agency in our nation’s 250-year history. It accomplished nothing it set out to accomplish, and Americans deserve a clear account of why. In July 2025, Republicans used their monopoly control of Washington to pass the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which gave ICE roughly $75 billion and CBP roughly $65 billion through reconciliation, outside the normal appropriations process, with funding available for four years. I vehemently opposed that bill. Walling off that much money from annual oversight was a grave mistake, and the consequences were predictable: masked federal agents, needless deaths of American citizens, and shockingly aggressive removals of non-criminal illegal aliens. In January, I voted for a bipartisan DHS funding package that included real reforms and guardrails on ICE. It was not perfect, but it was the last real chance Congress had to attach accountability to this agency before the next election. My Democratic colleagues in both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees supported this negotiated bill before rescinding that support. Congressional Democrats rejected that deal and refused to fund DHS, demanding a broad list of reforms and accountability for ICE. The Administration countered with five reforms, including body-worn cameras, limiting civil immigration enforcement at sensitive sites and enforcing visible officer identification – but Democratic leadership refused. That bet did not pay off, and it was never going to. ICE and CBP were already funded for years through the Big Beautiful Bill. Withholding annual appropriations was never going to constrain their behavior. What it did do was burn the only leverage we had to write guardrails into law. Republicans will now use another partisan procedural move to pre-fund ICE and CBP for the remainder of the President’s term, with none of the reforms that were on the table in January. Funding will again sit outside the annual appropriations process, which means Congress will have less oversight of immigration enforcement, not more, through the end of this administration. We cannot become blind to the balance sheet of what we win and what we lose in any given fight. I voted to restore DHS funding more than once. I value the work the men and women of that department do. I do not believe walking away from a deal with guardrails, in pursuit of a better deal that was never coming, is how you protect the communities most affected by ICE’s behavior. It is how you lose them. I held this position through death threats, threats against my family, and threats against our livelihood. I would hold it again. A glass half full is better than an empty one. It is a charming lie, a seductive lie, that a broken thing is below our dignity to fight for or fix. But I strongly affirm that fighting to fix a broken thing is not a flaw of Congress – it’s the whole damn point. Share on