Senate Democrats are threatening to shut down parts of the government if Congress doesn’t fix accountability problems at the Department of Homeland Security, especially with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This comes after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a man in Minneapolis last Saturday. It’s the third shooting by federal agents in Minnesota this month during ongoing protests against ICE.
The deadline to pass the spending bill and avoid a shutdown is Friday at midnight. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats will block the government funding bill if it includes the current DHS funding. The bill needs 60 votes to pass, but Republicans only have 53 seats. At least one Republican, Senator Rand Paul, will likely vote against it, so Republicans need at least eight Democrats to help.
According to The Washington Post, Senator Schumer said Democrats want common sense reforms in the DHS spending bill. He said that because Republicans refuse to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is “woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”
Democrats are demanding real accountability from federal immigration agents
Several important Democrats have joined Schumer’s position, making a shutdown very possible. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, who opposed last year’s shutdown, said she won’t support the current funding bill. She criticized the situation, saying, “The Trump administration and Kristi Noem are putting undertrained, combative federal agents on the streets with no accountability.”
Nevada’s other Democratic Senator, Jacky Rosen, agreed. She said she would vote against the funding bill “until we have guardrails in place to curtail these abuses of power and ensure more accountability and transparency.”
Other senators, including Tim Kaine of Virginia, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and Mark Warner of Virginia, have also said they won’t vote to fund DHS under the current conditions. Democrats are mainly upset about the lack of required transparency, especially with body cameras.
The recent shooting in Minneapolis happened shortly after ICE killed Renee Good in Minnesota. As ICE operations expand across major cities, tensions between the agency and local communities continue to grow. In that case, an ICE agent was filming the operation on his cell phone instead of using a hands-free body camera.
The House passed a bill giving $20 million for buying and using body cameras for federal immigration agents. But top House Democrat Rosa DeLauro said Republicans rejected her request to require agents to actually wear the cameras. This is a big problem for accountability because funding cameras without requiring their use doesn’t solve anything.
The lack of a requirement is especially worrying because President Trump signed an order last year that canceled a previous policy requiring federal law enforcement agents, including ICE agents, to wear body cameras.
DHS is also cutting back the body camera program. In its June 2025 budget request to Congress, the agency asked to cut funding for the ICE body camera program by nearly 75 percent, reducing it by $15 million from the previous $20.6 million. They also wanted to reduce staff from 22 people to just three.
Meanwhile, how Democrats respond to anti-ICE protests has become a major political issue. However, the spokesperson didn’t say whether new policies would require using the body cameras. If the Senate doesn’t pass the spending bill, a partial government shutdown would affect DHS and other agencies, including Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.
Published: Jan 25, 2026 12:15 pm