Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) now backs the very Senate proposal he previously called "a joke." The plan would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security with Democratic support while pushing funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol to a separate track later in the year, one that wouldn't require Democratic votes. Johnson changed his tune on Wednesday after President Trump endorsed the strategy.
Hard-line conservatives aren't buying it.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus moved quickly to signal opposition, warning that separating border enforcement funding from the broader DHS package hands Democrats exactly the leverage they need to gut immigration enforcement down the road. House GOP leadership declined to attempt passage of the Senate bill during a Thursday pro forma session, and House Republicans were set to meet on a conference call at 11 a.m. EDT Thursday to hash out the path forward.
The objection from the right isn't procedural hairsplitting. It's strategic. Rep. Keith Self, a Texas Republican and member of the Freedom Caucus, laid it out plainly on X:
"Funding for ICE and CBP must never be separated from DHS funding."
Self's argument is straightforward: isolating border enforcement funding on a separate legislative track turns it into a perpetual hostage. Every future negotiation becomes an opportunity for Democrats to strip resources from the very agencies tasked with securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants. He drove the point home:
"If Republicans isolate it, they're handing our border and ICE agents straight to the radicals who will defund and dismantle them every chance they get. Fund DHS fully, or the open borders globalists win."
According to The Hill, former Freedom Caucus chair Scott Perry put it even more bluntly:
"Let's make this simple: caving to Democrats and not paying CBP and ICE is agreeing to defund Law Enforcement and leaving our borders wide open again. If that's the vote, I'm a NO."
Perry called the Senate bill a gift to Democrats. It's hard to argue he's wrong about the optics.
Johnson faces a narrow set of options, none of them clean. He may need to shore up support from House Republicans on a rule vote to set up debate and a final vote on the Senate bill. Johnson has struggled in the past to pass rule votes, a recurring headache that reflects the thin margins and ideological diversity within the House Republican conference.
The alternative is worse. Johnson could bring the bill to the floor via the suspension calendar, a procedural track that bypasses the rule vote entirely. The catch: suspension requires two-thirds support to pass. That means Johnson would need a wall of Democratic votes to get it across the finish line.
Democrats were already eager to support the Senate bill last week. Of course they were. A plan that funds most of DHS while stranding border enforcement funding on a separate timeline is exactly the kind of arrangement that lets the left claim bipartisan cooperation while quietly undermining the agencies they've spent years trying to kneecap.
This is the kind of moment that reveals what a majority actually means. Republicans control the House. They control the Senate. They hold the White House. And yet the proposal on the table would fund the Department of Homeland Security on terms that require Democratic cooperation while deferring the enforcement funding that is supposedly the centerpiece of the party's agenda.
The Freedom Caucus members raising alarms understand something that procedural pragmatists sometimes miss: legislative structure creates legislative reality. Once ICE and Border Patrol funding live on their own track, it becomes the thing that gets traded away. It becomes the concession in every future continuing resolution, every debt ceiling fight, every omnibus negotiation. The agencies responsible for interior enforcement and border security become funding orphans, dependent on a separate fight that may never come or may come with strings attached.
Consider the pattern. Democrats spent years calling for the defunding or abolition of ICE. They ran campaigns on it. They introduced legislation to do it. The idea that they would protect standalone ICE funding in future negotiations requires a level of faith in progressive goodwill that recent history does not support.
Trump's endorsement of the strategy predicts that most Republicans will ultimately fall in line. That has been the gravitational pull of this Congress: when the President signals a direction, the conference generally follows. But the Freedom Caucus objections aren't trivial, and the mechanics of getting this bill through the House remain genuinely uncertain.
If Johnson goes the rule vote route, a handful of conservative defections could sink it. If he goes the suspension route, he's governing with Democratic votes on a homeland security bill, a visual that will follow every member into November's midterms.
The question isn't whether DHS gets funded. It will. The question is whether Republicans use their unified government to fund border enforcement on their terms or whether they hand Democrats a structural advantage that outlasts any single vote.
Self and Perry are asking their colleagues to think past Thursday. That's not seething. That's strategy.
