House approves bill to fund DHS, ending record-long partial shutdown
The bill funds all DHS agencies except immigration enforcement operations.
After months of resistance, the House on Thursday passed the Senate-backed Department of Homeland Security funding bill, which funds all agencies inside DHS except immigration enforcement operations.
The bill passed via voice vote. There was no recorded vote requested.
President Donald Trump signed the bill Thursday afternoon, a White House confirmed, effectively ending the record-long DHS shutdown after 76 days.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin had warned extra funding to pay his department's employees would have "dried up" by the first week of May.
The House took action just before Congress leaves for a weeklong recess.
"This will relieve pressure from the Department of Homeland Security," Johnson told reporters after the vote. "We're not going to have lines at TSA. Everybody will get their paychecks now. We'll get moving forward."
While the package funds most of DHS -- the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency -- it does not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection.
Republicans are working on a separate budget bill to fund those agencies through reconciliation, a process that will allow them to pass legislation without any Democratic support.
Late Wednesday night, House Republicans narrowly approved a budget blueprint that would provide billions of dollars to ICE and CBP, funding the agencies for the remainder of Trump's term.
Trump set a June 1 deadline for Republicans to fund the immigration enforcement agencies.
The DHS funding fight kicked into high gear after two American citizens were fatally shot by federal agents during Trump's immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
Democrats said they would not support funding without significant reforms to ICE and CBP's operating procedures. But talks between Democrats and the White House in March ultimately yielded no breakthrough.
"Democrats got absolutely nothing for their political charade and shenanigans," Johnson said on Thursday.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the chamber's top Democrat, criticized Johnson for waiting weeks to vote on the DHS funding bill that passed the Senate by unanimous consent on March 27.
"Over a month of unnecessary pain for millions of Americans brought to you by the House GOP," Schumer posed on X.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the House GOP "kept the Department of Homeland Security shut down because of their toxic demand to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on ICE brutality."
ABC News Capitol Hill Correspondent Jay O'Brien pressed Johnson on why the House didn't act on the measure sooner. The speaker defended his decision to stall the vote, saying he waited until Republicans passed the budget resolution for ICE and CBP before moving on funding for the rest of DHS.
"They wanted to orphan these two critical agencies that are under the umbrella of Homeland Security, I remind everybody on the Hill all the time, Department of Homeland Security is the third-largest department of the federal government. It has critical responsibilities," Johnson said.
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