Another partial government shutdown began Saturday, with lawmakers at an impasse. But this one is different.
With congressional Democrats refusing to approve funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the last of that agency’s funding has run out.
It all stems from party-line disagreements surrounding ICE and immigration enforcement.
When a funding lapse triggered a partial government shutdown on Jan. 31, Congress made a compromise: It approved spending bills for all agencies, except for DHS.
DHS received two weeks of funding to give Congress more time to negotiate Immigration and Customs Enforcement changes, a push Senate Democrats have repeatedly made after federal immigration and border agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis last month.
Now those two weeks are up and Congress is still in a standoff. Democrats want to see more guardrails regarding how ICE agents identify themselves, barring them from wearing masks, and requiring name badges. But Republicans say those practices would add too much risk to the job.
Since all other government agencies have already been funded, DHS is the only one affected by the shutdown.
Here’s what that means.
What’s a partial government shutdown?
A partial government shutdown happens when Congress has funded only certain federal agencies, leaving others in limbo. Some parts of the government close while others keep operating.
In this case, it comes down to who has funding and who doesn’t. DHS is the only agency without approved funding. The agency’s fiscal year ends Sept. 30, meaning it currently stands without funding for seven months or until Congress reaches an agreement.
When did government funding expire?
Funding for DHS expired Friday at midnight. A shutdown began Saturday at 12:01 a.m. after Congress and President Donald Trump’s administration failed to reach an agreement.
What changes with the partial shutdown?
Not much in the eyes of the general public, according to CNN.
Nearly all DHS workers remain on the job, but many won’t get paid until the shutdown ends.
But DHS officials who testified before a House panel on Wednesday warned that a funding disruption could mean delays to states seeking reimbursements for disaster relief costs, delays in cybersecurity response, and missed paychecks for agents who screen bags at airports, which could lead to unplanned absences and longer wait times.
DHS is home to agencies including the Transportation Security Aadministration, Coast Guard, and Federal Emergency Management Agency, which are all affected.
What have Pennsylvania politicians said?
Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) said he “absolutely” expected a shutdown. He broke with most Senate Democrats, voting to approve funding and avoid a shutdown in a measure that failed, and arguing that delaying funding DHS won’t impact ICE since the agency has received separate funding.
Earlier this month, some members of the Pennsylvania delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, including Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan, Brendan Boyle, Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, Dwight Evans, and Summer Lee, penned a letter to Fetterman and Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) asking them to vote against passing the spending bill unless ICE reform is secured. (Both senators voted in favor, but it failed.)
Houlahan, a Democrat from Chester County, criticized ICE last week and emphasized a need for immigration reform.
“We are a nation of immigrants, but ICE is clearly not reform. ICE is undertrained. ICE is vastly, vastly overfunded,” she said. “They have a budget that is larger than many countries’ entire defense budgets.”
Where does Congress stand right now?
The House had already done its part and approved funding. The chamber is in recess until Feb. 17. But Senate Democrats are pushing back on its approval without immigration reforms. That leaves the Senate with few options if it cannot pass the current measures.
The Senate adjourned Thursday for a Presidents’ Day recess after a motion to advance DHS funding failed 52-47, mostly along party lines. Democrats also blocked an attempt to extend funding for another two weeks.
Lawmakers left town, some traveling to the Munich Security Conference in Germany, others to meetings nationwide and overseas.
The chambers are not scheduled to return until Feb. 23, though that could change if a deal is reached in the meantime. But senators on each side say bipartisanship during an election year seems unlikely.
In recent years, a string of the state’s iconic diners have shuttered their doors. New state legislation aims to keep the lights on at those still in business.
The bill, which was introduced in the New Jersey Senate in January, would provide some diners and other historic restaurants with tax benefits.
“Diners, and specifically historic diners, are a cornerstone of our great state, having served residents and visitors for many decades. They are part of our culture and our history, and we have a duty to help them thrive,” State Sen. Paul Moriarty of Gloucester County, a sponsor of the bill, said in a statement Thursday.
The legislation, which would establish a registry of historic diners and restaurants, would give the businesses a tax credit of up to $25,000. Only diners and family-owned restaurants operating for at least 25 yearswill qualify.
The bill has been referred to the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.
“It has been heartbreaking to see so many of these well-known establishments close or dramatically cut their hours,” Moriarity said.
Where have diners closed in New Jersey?
The origin of the modern diner can be traced back to a horse-drawn lunch wagon in 19th-century Rhode Island and the model has evolved since then. New Jersey has been coined the “diner capital” of the U.S. but has seen closures in recent years due to increased operating expenses, the challenge of finding employees, and the impact of the pandemic.
The Cherry Hill Diner closed in 2023 after 55 years in business and following the co-owner’s unsuccessful search for a buyer. South Jersey’s Gateway Diner in Gloucester County closed that same year amid construction of the Westville Route 47 Bridge and the state’s acquisition of the site. The Red Lion Diner in Burlington County also sold, making way for a Wawa.
In January 2024, the Star View Diner in Camden County closed. Last year, the Collingswood Diner shut its doors in August, to be replaced by a marijuana dispensary.
The trend extended in Philadelphia where the Midtown III closed in 2020. Last year, the Mayfair Diner in Northeast Philadelphia was listed for sale.
State Rep. Chris Rabb, who is running in a competitive primary forPhiladelphia’s open congressional seat, said that his now-former campaign treasurer made unauthorized withdrawals and that he has reported her to federal authorities for “misconduct.”
The treasurer, Yolanda Brown, is a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based campaign consultant who was accused last month of embezzling six figures’ worth of campaign dollars from another Democrat.
Rabb said in an interview Friday that he would not speculate on the amount of money that may have been stolen, citing a pending review. He said he reported the matter to the Federal Election Commission.
“My team and I remain committed to this campaign toward a collective victory on May 19,” said Rabb, who is running to succeed retiring Democratic U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans.
Brown, who manages the firm Brown Financial Consulting Services Group LLC, did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
A campaign treasurer is generally responsible for a political action committee’s bank account and is often tasked with ensuring legal compliance. Rabb on Monday filed paperwork with the FEC to list himself as his campaign’s treasurer, replacing Brown.
Last month, Ken Welch, the mayor of St. Petersburg, Fla., accused Brown of embezzling $207,000 from his campaign committee. Attorneys for Welch’s campaign told a local Fox television station that they had discovered Brown made “improper transactions” and that they had “demanded the return of funds.” When the money was not sent back, Welch’s campaign notified state and federal law enforcement, the station reported.
Campaign finance reports showed that Welch’s PAC had made several transactions, including one for $100,000, to a business that Brown controlled.
The developments came as the race for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, which covers about half of Philadelphia, was just heating up. Rabb is considered among a handful of front-runners seeking the Democratic nomination to represent the district, which is one of the most Democratic-leaning in the country.
Rabb was not in attendance at several events this week — including two community forums — citing an emergency.
State Sen. Sharif Street, the former head of the state Democratic Party, had more than half a million dollars in the bank as of Jan. 1, according to his most recently filed campaign finance report. Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon, had nearly $400,000 on hand after lending her campaign $250,000 of her own money.
Rabb, by comparison, had just shy of $100,000 in the bank. That came after a lackluster fundraising quarter — he raised $127,000 in the final three months of 2025, significantly less than the $257,000 he raised in the previous reporting period.
Gov. Josh Shapiro implored Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this week to reconsider converting warehouses in Berks and Schuylkill counties into mass immigration detention centers, citing “real harms” to the communities.
In a Thursday letter to Noem obtained by The Inquirer, Shapiro questioned the legality of the facilities, which the governor said could hold up to 9,000 people in total.
Hinting at a possible lawsuit, Shapiro said if DHS goes through with converting the sites, his administration will “aggressively pursue every option to prevent these facilities from opening and needlessly harming the good people of Pennsylvania.”
As part of President Donald Trump’s expanding deportation agenda, the federal government has started purchasing warehouses across the country to flip into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. ICE is planning to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers, The Washington Post reported.
Shapiro slammed the department’s escalating immigration enforcement strategy, saying that ICE and other federal immigration agents “resort to unnecessary and excessive force, leading to innocent people being injured or tragically killed.”
“Your Department’s record is reason enough to oppose your plan to use warehouses in Schuylkill and Berks Counties as detention centers,” Shapiro wrote, adding that the warehouses would also negatively impact residents’ health and safety, deplete tax revenue, and put extra stress on local communities and emergency response.
Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, confirmed ICE’s purchase of these two warehouses and the department’s plans to use them as detention facilities in a statement to The Inquirer Friday.
She said that the sites will “undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure prior to purchase” and that the facilities would create economic benefits, including bringing more than 11,000 jobs to the two Pennsylvania communities in total.
“Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities,” McLaughlin said.
He’s said the Trump administration’s strategies in American cities make communities less safe, violate constitutional rights, and erode trust in law enforcement.
In his letter to Noem, Shapiro said that DHS has not engaged local leaders to discuss the warehouse purchases and that both Democratic and Republican state and local officials have objected to the department’s “plans to interfere with our communities because of the chaos and harm your actions will bring.”
Some of Shapiro’s cabinet secretaries also penned an additional letter to Noem where they stressed that the facilities would be detrimental to the communities’ environment and public health and safety.
“The stress each facility will place on local infrastructure will, among other things, jeopardize Pennsylvanians’ access to safe water, deplete resources and infrastructure needed for emergencies, and overextend already strained emergency response personnel,” wrote Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra L. Bogen, Fire Commissioner Thomas Cook, Emergency Management Director Randy Padfield, Environmental Protection Secretary Jessica Shirley, and Labor Secretary Nancy A. Walker.
In addition to the warehouses, DHS is also leasing new office space throughout the country, including in the Philadelphia area. The department said back-office staff, including lawyers and analysts, will be moving into a building in Berwyn, and the department will also share space with the Department of Motor Vehicles at Eighth and Arch Streets in Center City, WIRED reported.
Despite the governor’s vocal opposition to Trump’s enforcementstrategies, Pennsylvania still cooperates with ICE. Shapiro’s administration honors some ICE detainers in state prisons and provides ICE with access to state databases that include personal identifying information for immigrants.
Immigrant rights groups have for months called on Shapiro to take more decisive action against federal immigration enforcement in Pennsylvania and end all cooperation with the agency.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is suing Harvard University, saying it has refused to provide admissions records that the Justice Department demanded to ensure the Ivy League school stopped using affirmative action in admissions.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Massachusetts, the Justice Department said Harvard has “thwarted” efforts to investigate potential discrimination. It accused Harvard of refusing to comply with a federal investigation and asked a judge to order the university to turn over the records.
Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, said Harvard’s refusal is a red flag. “If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it,” Dhillon said in a statement.
A statement from Harvard said the university has been responding to the government’s requests. It said Harvard is in compliance with the Supreme Court decision barring affirmative action in admissions.
“The University will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach,” the university said.
The suit is the latest salvo in President Donald Trump’s standoff with Harvard, which has faced billions of dollars in funding cuts and other sanctions after it rejected a list of demands from the administration last year.
Trump officials have said they’re taking action against Harvard over allegations of anti-Jewish bias on campus. Harvard officials say they’re facing unconstitutional retaliation for refusing to adopt the administration’s ideological views. The administration is appealing a judge’s orders that sided with Harvard in two lawsuits.
The Justice Department opened a compliance review into Harvard’s admissions practices last April on the same day the White House issued a series of sweeping demands aligned with Trump’s priorities. The agency told Harvard to hand over five years of admissions data for undergraduate applicants along with Harvard’s medical and law schools.
It asked for a trove of data including applicants’ grades, test scores, essays, extracurricular activities and admissions outcomes, along with their race and ethnicity. It asked for the data by April 25, 2025. The lawsuit said Harvard has not provided that data.
Justice Department officials said they need the data to determine whether Harvard has continued considering applicants’ race in admissions decisions. The Supreme Court barred affirmative action in admissions in 2023 after lawsuits challenged it at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Trump officials have accused colleges of continuing the practice, which the administration says discriminates against white and Asian American students.
The White House is separately pressing universities across the U.S. to providing similar data to determine whether they have continued to factor race into admissions decisions. The Education Department plans to collect more detailed admissions data from colleges after Trump signed an action suggesting schools were ignoring the Supreme Court decision.
Trump’s dispute with Harvard had appeared to be winding down last summer after the president repeatedly said they were finalizing a deal to restore Harvard’s federal funding. The deal never materialized, and Trump rekindled the conflict this month when he said Harvard must pay $1 billion as part of any deal, double what he previously demanded.
The Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump’s critics entered a new phase this week, when federal prosecutors failedto indict six Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding military service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders.
Department lawyers, under pressure from the president, previously targeted several of Trump’s most outspoken foes, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both faced since-dismissed charges last year over alleged conduct unrelated to their politicalviews.
But the case federal prosecutors put before a grand jury Tuesday — seeking to charge Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) and four others over their90-secondvideo message — marked the first time the department has directly soughtto classify critical speech from prominent Trump detractors as a crime.
The other lawmakers who participated in the video included Reps. Jason Crow, a former Army ranger from Colorado, and Maggie Goodlander, a Navy veteran from New Hampshire, as well as Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer, and Chris Deluzio, a former Navy officer, both from Pennsylvania.
Grand jurors roundly rejected the effort, the Washington Post reported. But legal observers and the lawmakers at the center of the probe have argued in the days since that the panel’s decision is almost beside the point.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) speak during a news conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
“This is not a good news story,” Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, told reporters during a news conference this week. “This is a story about how Donald Trump and his cronies are trying to break our system to silence anyone who lawfully speaks out against them.”
The attempt to charge the lawmakers represents an evolution of the campaign that began last year with cases against James and Comey, said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College.
“Prosecuting people for speech criticizing the president is in some ways even more dangerous,” Nyhan said, “especially given these are legislators acting in their public role and especially given that they were calling for the military and national security state to follow the law.”
Still, some Trump allies in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), defended the administration’s efforts. He told reporters that Slotkin, Kelly, and the others “probably should be indicted.”
“Any time you’re obstructing law enforcement and getting in the way of these sensitive operations, it’s a very serious thing, and it probably is a crime,” he said.
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation intothe lawmakers began after the video organized by Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, was posted online in November. In it, she and the others, all of whom served in the military or with intelligence agencies, reminded service members of their duty, spelled out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to resist unlawful directives.
“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” the lawmakers said. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”
The video did not single out any specificTrump administrationpolicies. But Slotkin and Kelly, both of whom serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, have sharply criticized the president for military strikes he authorized on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and his decision to deploy the National Guard to cities run by Democratic officials.
Their video drew an immediate reaction from Trump, who demanded on social media that the lawmakers face prosecution for sedition and suggested they should even, perhaps, be punished with execution.
“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump wrote in one social media post soon after the video was posted. He said in another: “IT WAS SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer and a Democrat who represents Chester County, was one of six lawmakers targeted over a 90-second video message.
The messages echoed another Trump post from last year in which he, in a missive addressed to “Pam,”an apparent reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi, insisted the Justice Department move swiftly to prosecute Comey, James, and others.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote then, adding, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Within months,James was indicted on counts of mortgage fraud, while Comey was charged with lying to Congress. Both denied the accusations and their cases were later dismissed by a federal judge over technicalissues with the appointment of the prosecutor who had charged them.
Slotkin, Kelly, and the other lawmakers have maintained they did nothing wrong — even as top administration officials have accused them of using the video to encourage service members to take actions tantamount to mutiny.
Earlier this month, four of the lawmakers in the video disclosed that they had been approached by FBI agents and declined to give voluntary interviews to prosecutors.
“It was clearly, when our lawyers sat down with them, just about checking a box and doing what the president wanted them to do,” Slotkin said Wednesday. “Their heart wasn’t even in it.”
It is not clear whether the FBI took other steps to investigate. But on Tuesday, prosecutors under the supervision of D.C.’s U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host and staunch Trump ally, presented a case against the lawmakers to the grand jury.
Two political appointees led that presentation, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sealed court proceedings.
The prosecutors — Steven Vandervelden, a former colleague of Pirro’s in the district attorney’s office in Westchester, New York, and Carlton Davis, a former staffer for House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) — sought to charge the lawmakers with a felony crime that makes it illegal to “interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States,” the people said.
But when it came time to vote, none of the grand jurors agreed there was sufficient probable cause to charge any of the lawmakers with a crime, one of the people familiar said.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and for Pirro have declined to comment on the matter in the days since. Amid that silence,the effort has drawn an impassioned response from Capitol Hill.
“The fact that they failed to incarcerate a United States senator should not obviate our outrage,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said during a heated session Wednesday in which Democratic senators implored their Republican colleagues to openly condemn the Justice Department’s actions. Senate Democrats held a special caucus meeting Thursday morning to further discuss the situation.
“They tried to incarcerate two of us,” Schatz said. “I am not entirely sure the United States Senate can survive this if we do not have Republicans standing up.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) has emerged as one of the few Republicans to publicly rebuke the department. He described the failed attempt to prosecute as exactly the type of weaponization of the justice system that the Trump administration has said it is fighting against.
“Political lawfare is not normal, not acceptable, and needs to stop,” Tillis wrote in a post to X.
At their news conference Wednesday,Kelly told reporters that he and Slotkin learned about the attempt to indict them Tuesday through media reports.
“If things had gone a different way, we’d be preparing for arrest,” Slotkin said.
Since then, lawyers for several of the targeted lawmakers have sent letters to Pirro and Bondi seeking assurances that the investigation is over and that prosecutors will not seek to indict them again. They’ve also instructed the department to retain all records of the investigation threatening potential legal action for violating the lawmakers’ free-speech rights.
In a separate suit filed by Kelly, a federal judge Thursday halted Defense Department efforts to formally censure the senator over his video remarks, saying the effort to do so “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.”
“The intimidation was the point — to get other people beyond us to think twice about speaking out,” Slotkin said Wednesday. “But the real question is if the president can do this to us — sitting senators — who else can he do it to?”
The Trump administration spent more than $40 million last year to send hundreds of migrants to at least two-dozen countries that are not their own, a tactic Senate Democrats described in a report Friday as a costly strategy aimed at sowing fear and intimidation in the president’s mass deportation campaign.
The 30-page analysis from the minority members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accuses the administration of entering into opaque financial agreements with foreign governments — including some with poor records on corruption and human rights — to rapidly expand a program for “third country” removals that once had been reserved for exceptional circumstances.
Its authors contend that the State Department has failed to conduct sufficient oversight to ensure that payments to those countries are not being misspent and that migrants transferred to their custody are not being abused or mistreated.
The administration “has expanded and institutionalized a system in which the United States urges or coerces countries to accept migrants who are not their citizens, often through arrangements that are costly, inefficient and poorly monitored,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues. “Deporting migrants to countries they have no connection to … has become a routine instrument of diplomacy.”
Administration officials have said they have no choice but to partner with foreign governments that are willing to accept undocumented immigrants whose native nations are not willing to take them back. In most cases, the migrants have criminal records, authorities said, though public records have shown that some have not been convicted of crimes in the United States.
The report from Senate Democrats, which provides the most comprehensive look at the administration’s third-country removal program, found that the U.S. government has sent migrants to two-dozen third countries. The analysis focused primarily on five nations — El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Eswatini, and Palau — with which the Trump administration has entered into direct financial payments totaling $32 million, a committee member involved in the report said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the analysis ahead of its release.
Under those agreements, U.S. authorities sent about 250 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador last spring, while 29 migrants have been deported to Equatorial Guinea, 15 to Eswatini, and seven to Rwanda, the report said. None has been sent to Palau.
The report also estimated that the administration has spent more than $7 million in costs related to deportation flights to 10 of the third countries.
“Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent without meaningful oversight or accountability,” Shaheen wrote in her letter. “And speed and deterrence are being prioritized over due process and respect for human rights.”
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said the report shows the “unprecedented” work the administration has undertaken in its first year to enforce immigration laws.
“Astonishingly, some in Congress still want to go back to a time just 14 months ago when cartels had free rein to poison Americans and our border was open,” Pigott said in a statement. “Make no mistake, President Trump has brought Biden’s era of mass illegal immigration to an end, and we are all safer for it.”
The third-country strategy has provoked public blowback and legal challenges that have slowed the administration’s efforts and, in some instances, forced it to change course.
Last spring, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law targeting enemy combatants, which provided the administration’s legal rationale to send the Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. Administration officials accused many of being members of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang, though some of their families and attorneys disputed that contention.
The men were later transferred from El Salvador to Venezuela under a prisoner swap. On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington ruled thatthe administration must bring some of the Venezuelan deportees back to the United States as they pursue legal challenges to their removals.
“It is worth emphasizing that this situation would never have arisen had the Government simply afforded Plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them,” Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote in his ruling.
The analysis from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority was put together over a period of more than eight months, based on conversations with foreign government and U.S. government officials, attorneys for deportees and immigrant rights organizations, according to the committee staffer.
The staffer said the goal of the report is to highlight the costs of the administration’s approach at a time when Democrats are concerned that the U.S. government is “entering a new phase” of speeding up the number of third-country agreements, along with the pace of deportations.
The report faults the administration for pursuing its deportation policies at the expense of other U.S. interests, including promoting human rights and punishing corrupt foreign regimes.
The authors said the Trump administration’s payment of $7.5 million to Equatorial Guinea to accept immigrants was more than the amount of foreign assistance the United States provided to that country in the previous eight years. They cited a 2025 State Department report on human trafficking that cited U.S. concerns about “corruption and official complicity in trafficking crimes” in that country.
The report also said the Trump administration was moving hastily to carry out third-country removals without trying to negotiate with the home countries of some deportees. In one case, a man initially deported to Eswatini was later sent to his home nation of Jamaica, where government officials said they had never told the United States that they were unwilling to accept him.
“As a result, the Trump Administration has, in some cases, paid twice for migrants’ travel — once to remove them to a third country and then again to fly them to their home country,” the report says.
WASHINGTON — A shutdown for the Department of Homeland Security appeared certain Thursday as lawmakers in the House and Senate were set to leave Washington for a 10-day break and negotiations with the White House over Democrats’ demands for new restrictions had stalled.
Democrats and the White House have traded offers in recent days as the Democrats have said they want curbs on President Donald Trump’s broad campaign of immigration enforcement. They have demanded better identification for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement officers, a new code of conduct for those agencies and more use of judicial warrants, among other requests.
The White House sent its latest proposal late Wednesday, but Trump told reporters on Thursday that some of the Democratic demands would be “very, very hard to approve.”
Democrats said the White House offer, which was not made public, did not include sufficient curbs on ICE after two protesters were fatally shot last month. The offer was “not serious,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday, after the Senate rejected a bill to fund the department.
Americans want accountability and “an end to the chaos,” Schumer said. “The White House and congressional Republicans must listen and deliver.”
Lawmakers in both chambers were on notice to return to Washington if the two sides struck a deal to end the expected shutdown. Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters that Democrats would send the White House a counterproposal over the weekend.
Impact of a shutdown
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said after the vote that a shutdown appeared likely and “the people who are not going to be getting paychecks” will pay the price.
The impact of a DHS shutdown is likely to be minimal at first. It would not likely block any of the immigration enforcement operations, as Trump’s tax and spending cut bill passed last year gave ICE about $75 billion to expand detention capacity and bolster enforcement operations.
But the other agencies in the department — including the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard — could take a bigger hit over time.
Gregg Phillips, an associate administrator at FEMA, said at a hearing this week that its disaster relief fund has sufficient balances to continue emergency response activities during a shutdown, but would become seriously strained in the event of a catastrophic disaster.
Phillips said that while the agency continues to respond to threats like flooding and winter storms, long-term planning and coordination with state and local partners will be “irrevocably impacted.”
Trump defends officer masking
Trump, who has remained largely silent during the bipartisan talks, noted Thursday that a recent court ruling rejected a ban on masks for federal law enforcement officers.
“We have to protect our law enforcement,” Trump told reporters.
Democrats made the demands for new restrictions on ICE and other federal law enforcement after ICU nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 24. Renee Good was shot by ICE agents on Jan. 7.
Trump agreed to a Democratic request that the Homeland Security bill be separated from a larger spending measure that became law last week. That package extended Homeland Security funding at current levels only through Friday.
Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York have said they want immigration officers to remove their masks, to show identification and to better coordinate with local authorities. They have also demanded a stricter use-of-force policy for the federal officers, legal safeguards at detention centers and a prohibition on tracking protesters with body-worn cameras.
Democrats also say Congress should end indiscriminate arrests and require that before a person can be detained, authorities have verified that the person is not a U.S. citizen.
Thune suggested there were potential areas of compromise, including on masks. There could be contingencies “that these folks aren’t being doxed,” Thune said. “I think they could find a landing place.”
But Republicans have been largely opposed to most of the items on the Democrats’ list, including a prohibition on masks.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said Republicans who have pushed for stronger immigration enforcement would benefit politically from the Democratic demands.
“So if they want to have that debate, we’ll have that debate all they want,” said Schmitt.
Judicial warrants a sticking point
Thune, who has urged Democrats and the White House to work together, indicated that another sticking point is judicial warrants.
“The issue of warrants is going to be very hard for the White House or for Republicans,” Thune said of the White House’s most recent offer. “But I think there are a lot of other areas where there has been give, and progress.”
Schumer and Jeffries have said DHS officers should not be able to enter private property without a judicial warrant and that warrant procedures and standards should be improved. They have said they want an end to “roving patrols” of agents who are targeting people in the streets and in their homes.
Most immigration arrests are carried out under administrative warrants. Those are internal documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize the arrest of a specific person but do not permit officers to forcibly enter private homes or other nonpublic spaces without consent. Traditionally, only warrants signed by judges carry that authority.
But an internal ICE memo obtained by The Associated Press last month authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move that advocates say collides with Fourth Amendment protections.
Far from agreement
Thune, R-S.D., said were “concessions” in the White House offer. He would not say what those concessions were, though, and he acknowledged the sides were “a long ways toward a solution.”
Schumer said it was not enough that the administration had announced an end to the immigration crackdown in Minnesota that led to thousands of arrests and the fatal shootings of two protesters.
“We need legislation to rein in ICE and end the violence,” Schumer said, or the actions of the administration “could be reversed tomorrow on a whim.”
Simmering partisan tensions played out on the Senate floor immediately after the vote, as Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees Homeland Security funding, tried to pass a two-week extension of Homeland Security funding and Democrats objected.
Britt said Democrats were “posturing” and that federal employees would suffer for it. “I’m over it!” she yelled.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the Homeland spending subcommittee, responded that Democrats “want to fund the Department of Homeland Security, but only a department that is obeying the law.”
“This is an exceptional moment in this country’s history,” Murphy said.
Mejia will compete with Joe Hathaway, the former Randolph mayor who ran unopposed in the Republican primary, in an April special election. While Hathaway is far from supporting Mejia’s call for an end to ICE, he has also voiced support for making changes to the agency.
The encounter that has brought their views into focus happened Tuesday in Morris County. The incident, in whichan ICE agent fired a gun in Roxbury, is under investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. The attorney general’s office said no one was injured.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said the officer shot at an undocumented immigrant’s tires in self-defense during a targeted effort to detain him.
“This is a public safety issue,” Mejia said in an interview. “Abolishing ICE, to me, is the only reasonable step forward, because it is clear that ICE’s and DHS’s recruitment practices are clearly failing the American people. Their oversight and training is clearly failing the American people, and they have zero accountability.”
In Roxbury, a township of about 20,000 people, roughly 40 miles from New York City, local residents recently protested a proposed ICE facility, which Democratic politicians and the all-Republican town council alike oppose.
The township, which contains mostly Republican and unaffiliated voters, falls right outside of Sherrill’s former district, which includes other parts of the same county and has become fairly reliably blue.
Mejia said Tuesday’s confrontation raises concerns about guns going off in residential neighborhoods or near schools, and that it shows the “recklessness” of the Department of Homeland Security. She said she’s been in conversation with local Democratic officials who question DHS’s accountof the incident.
Hathaway disagrees with Mejia’s views on ICE, but he also stopped short of defending DHS when asked about Tuesday’s incident. He said in an interview that he needs more information to comment.
“I think it’s generally not a good thing when politicians try to stick our nose in and stoke the flames and politicize these kinds of things before we know the facts,” he said. “I certainly don’t want to do that in this case.”
A New York Times and Siena University poll published in late January found that a “sizable majority” of voters believe ICE “has gone too far,” while roughly half support Trump’s deportations and handling of the southern border.
DHS said the undocumented person driving the car in Roxburyhad a criminal history of drug trafficking charges, drug possession, and driving under the influence, and that a judge issued an order of removal for him in 2021. The federal agency said he “rammed into a law enforcement vehicle and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run an officer over” while trying to “evade arrest.”
“Following his training, the officer defensively used his firearm and shot out the tires of the vehicle to stop the threat,” an unnamed DHS spokesperson said. “Thankfully, no one was injured.” The driver was arrested and taken into ICE custody, DHS said.
The attorney general’s office requested that any witnesses share video footage of the incident. The request came right before Sherrill’s administration launched an online portal for New Jerseyans to submit videos of ICE, which she initially announced on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Video footage shared by bystanders contradicted the Trump administration’s account of two recent deadly shootings by federal agents in Minnesota.
Mejia argued during her campaign that ICE cannot be reformed and should be replaced with something else, such as a more efficient system of processing asylum or citizenship applications.
“I’m not calling for open borders,” she said Wednesday. “I’m not calling for the eradication of a system. I’m actually calling for the cease and desist of the violence of the occupation of American cities, of the overreach from this administration, and the erosion of constitutional protections.”
She said she believes Congress, in the short term, should stop funding ICE, reallocate funds for the agency that came as Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed funding for social services, stop surveilling and collecting data from Americans, and end qualified immunity for agents.
Senate Democrats blocked a funding bill for DHS Thursday amid unsuccessful negotiations with the White House to make changes to immigration enforcement operations following the shootings in Minneapolis.
Hathaway said he is “willing, absolutely, to come to the table to reform” how ICE operates, but that he also wants to see changes to sanctuary policies.
Sherrill’s administration has not provided more information about the Roxbury incident, citing an ongoing investigation.
“We recognize that matters of this nature raise concerns within our communities… it is my duty to protect the safety of residents of this state and uphold the Constitution. I will do everything in my power to fulfill this responsibility,” Acting Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said.
On Wednesday, Sherrill signed an executive order prohibiting ICE from operating on state-owned private property unless there’s a judicial warrant and launched a “know your rights” guide for residents interacting with immigration agents.
Mejia, who grew up in Elizabeth and lives in Glen Ridge in Essex County, said that as an Afro-Latina, she feels less safe during Trump’s immigration crackdown and that she takes precautions like carrying her passport or being careful where she speaks Spanish.
“It happening close to home is, of course, troubling, but this is an escalation that we have been seeing for years,” said Mejia.
Sitting onstage in an echoeyhistoric synagogue, next to a U.S. senatorand a cardboard cutout of his newly released memoir, Gov. Josh Shapiro reflected on the Pennsylvanians who give him hope.
As he had in other stops on his book tour up and down the East Coast, Shapirooften referred to his book’s title, Where We Keep The Light, and the ways he finds hope in the “extraordinary impact” of Pennsylvanians. Among them, he said, were those who were sexually abused by Catholic priests in crimes covered up by the church until they were illuminated by the victims’ unrelenting quest for justice.
“I find hope in the people I met who were abused over years and years and years,” Shapiro told U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) last month at an event at Sixth and I, a synagogue in Washington, “who still had the courage to show up in a grand jury room to testify and to challenge me to do something to make sure we righted a wrong and brought justice to them.”
The nearly 900-page report was lauded as the most comprehensive review of clergy abuse across a single state and prompted new laws clarifying penalties for failure to report abuse and allowing survivors more time to pursue criminal or civil cases against their abusers.
But a key step in delivering justice to those survivors — establishing a two-year window for the filing of lawsuits over decades-old abuse that falls outside the statute of limitations under existing law — remains unfinished.
The proposal has become one of the most fraught issues in Harrisburg. After a devastating clerical error by Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration killed a proposed constitutional amendment in 2021, lawmakers have been unable to come together on a new path forward. Republicans who control the state Senate have tied the proposal to policies Democrats will not support. All the while, the Catholic Church and the insurance industry have lobbied hard against it.
Nearly a dozen interviews with survivors, their family members, and advocates reveal a deep frustration with the inaction in Harrisburg. Even as Shapiro renews calls for the Senate to act, survivors are divided over whether he has done enough to use his power as governor to advocate for them.
A key pledge in Shapiro’s bid for reelection — and his pitch to a national audience — is that he can “get stuff done” by working across the aisle. But some abuse survivors in Pennsylvania say the unfinished business in getting justice for them brings that record into question.
“He got to where he’s at on the back of victims and survivors, and now he’s forgotten,” said Mike McIlmail, the father of a clergy abuse victim, Sean McIlmail, who died of an overdose shortly before he was supposed to testify in a criminal case against his alleged abuser.
Shapiro, his spokesperson Will Simons said, has fought for survivors “publicly and in legislative negotiations” since 2018. He has promised to sign any bill that reaches his desk establishing the window.
With a reelection campaignunderway and his eyes on flipping the state Senate, the governor renewed that fight earlier this month. He used his budget address to blame Senate Republicans for the inaction thus far.
“Stop cowering to the special interests, like insurance companies and lobbyists for the Catholic Church,” he said, his voice thundering in the House chamber. “Stop tying justice for abused kids to your pet political projects. And start listening to victims.”
Mike and Debbie McIlmail, parents of Sean McIlmail, in the office of (left) Marci Hamilton, in Philadelphia on March 29, 2022.
For most of the casesin the report, the statute of limitations had passed, leaving no legal recourse for survivors.
The report proposed that lawmakers create a two-year window to allow the filing of civil suits over cases that happened years, if not decades, ago. Despite Shapiro’s advocacy since releasing the grand jury report, the proposal has been trapped in a stalemate for years.
Pennsylvania trails more than 30 other states that have approved similar legislation.
Then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro speaks at a news conference in the state Capitol in 2018 about legislation to respond to a landmark grand jury report accusing hundreds of priests of sexually abusing children over decades stalled in the legislature.
“It’s maddening to have people say, ‘We’re committed to this, this is going to happen, we’re committed to it,’ from both sides of the political spectrum and nothing ever gets done,” said Jay Sefton, who says he was abused by a priest in Havertown as a middle schooler in the 1980s. “It does start to feel like these are lives being used as its own sort of theater.”
Gov. Josh Shapiro makes his annual budget proposal in the state House chamber Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026.
Speaking to journalists in Washington days before he targeted Republicans in his budget address, Shapiro tied the window’s prospects to Democrats’ ability to win the state Senate for the first time in more than three decades.
“I’m confident with a Democratic Senate that will be one of the first bills they put on my desk,” Shapiro said.
Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, a Republican, leaves the House chamber following Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s annual budget proposal speech in Harrisburg on Feb. 3.
In an interview, Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) noted that the GOP-controlled Senate had approved a constitutional amendment to establish the window several times before, although it ultimately failed to ever reach the voters.
She declined to say whether the state Senate would take up the amendment up this year but said creating the window through legislation, as Shapiro requested, would be unconstitutional.
“He has decided that he’s going to be moral instead of follow the law. Look at his record in his own office,” Ward said, arguing Shapiro has a track record of fighting for some survivors but not others. She pointed to his office’s handling of sexual harassment allegations brought against a former top staffer and close ally. Documents showed that complaints about the staffer were made months before his abrupt resignation.
For some clergy abuse survivors, the blame lands squarely on Ward and her Republican allies as they insist on a constitutional amendment, which requires two votes by both the House and Senate along with a ballot measure.
“It’s the Republicans that are blocking it, and I think they’re blocking it because of the church,” said Julianne Bortz, a survivor who testified before the grand jury and whose experience was featured in the report.
A portrait of former Pa. House Speaker Mark Rozzi hangs alongside painting of other former speakers in hallway at the state Capitol.
Debate among survivors
Despite Shapiro’s recent statements, there is a sense among some survivors that lawmakers, and Shapiro, have forgotten about them.
Former state House Speaker Mark Rozzi, a Berks County Democrat and clergy abuse survivor, said Shapiro “betrayed” survivors and should be playing “hardball” with the Senate to ensure that the bill makes it to his desk.
“Talk is cheap. Unless you come to the table and cut a deal, nothing else gets done,” Rozzi said.
Then-Pennsylvania House Speaker Mark Rozzi, center right, embraces Arthur Baselice, the father of Arthur Baselice III, after he testified at a hearing in Philadelphia on Jan. 27, 2023.
Advocates have spent years pushing lawmakers in Harrisburg and have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of movement.
“We, being the victims, have always held our end of the bargain. Always. We’ve always shown up when we’ve asked to, we’ve testified when we were asked to, we interviewed, we discussed the worst moments of our lives when asked,” said Shaun Dougherty, who said he was abused by an Altoona-Johnstown priest.
Now, he said, it’s the governor’s turn to get the work done.
Former State Rep. Bill Wachob, a Democrat who worked in politics after leaving elected office in the 1980s, is convinced the governor could make it happen through negotiations if he wanted.
“He and his team have made a calculated political decision that they have gotten as much mileage out of this issue as they’re going to get and they’re not doing anything more,” Wachob said.
In Shapiro’s memoir, however, he wrote he expected that going up against the Catholic Church in pursuing the 2018 report “was likely the end of the road for me politically.”
“I’d made my peace with being a one term Attorney General, if it meant that I could put my head on the pillow at night knowing I did my job and made good for these victims,” he wrote.
“I have no doubt that the governor has been doing what he can,” said Marci Hamilton, the founder of Child USA, which advocates for child sex abuse victims. She blamed the challenges in reaching a deal on Harrisburg’s partisan dynamics.
Recent criticism of Shapiro has driven division within the survivor community in recent weeks, said Mary McHale, a survivor who was featured in a 2022 Shapiro campaign ad.
“He cares. But he also has a state to run. This can’t be the No. 1 issue,” she said.
Diana Vojtasek, who said she was abused by the same Allentown priest as McHale, said she worries frustration is being misdirected at Shapiro instead of Republicans.
“I just don’t see the value in attacking the one who has vowed publicly that he will sign this legislation for us as soon as it’s across his desk,” she said.
Abuse survivor Shaun Dougherty (left) greets then-Gov. Tom Wolf in the State Capitol on Sept. 24, 2018.
“What the Epstein transparency act showed us is we are finally at a point where the protection of sexual abuse victims is nonpartisan,” Hamilton said. “I fully expect to see that that understanding for victims will happen in Harrisburg.”
Rep. Nathan Davidson, a Dauphin County Democrat who introduced the House legislation to create the window, has scheduled hearings in April to bring renewed attention to the issue.
Sefton, who said he was abused as a middle schooler in Havertown in the 1980s, will perform a one-man show about his experience in a theater just steps from the state Capitol the week of the hearings.
He is done hoping lawmakers will establish the window but said it would make the state safer if they did.
“Nobody is going to give anyone their childhood back. It can’t happen,” Sefton said.
“There’s always going to be a part of me that’s filled with some rage about people blocking the energy here. If that were to go through, it’s a piece of energy that gets finally freed up.”
