House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on national television Sunday to demand Speaker Mike Johnson haul lawmakers back to Washington and reopen the Department of Homeland Security, more than a month into a partial government shutdown that has left TSA agents working without pay and key security agencies in limbo. It was a striking bit of political theater from the leader of a caucus that helped produce the very impasse he now calls a crisis.
Jeffries appeared on ABC's "This Week" and laid the blame squarely at Johnson's feet, as The Hill reported. Both chambers are on recess and not scheduled to return until the week of April 13.
The minority leader framed the standoff as a matter of urgency. He pointed to airport disruptions and unpaid federal workers. But the timeline tells a different story about who has been willing to act and who has been playing defense.
On ABC, Jeffries delivered a carefully constructed appeal:
"The first thing that needs to happen is that the House of Representatives under the leadership of Speaker Johnson and Republicans need to bring us back into session so we can actually reopen the Department of Homeland Security, stop creating chaos at airports all across the country and forcing people, including what happened to TSA agents for weeks, to work without pay."
He went on to tout a Senate bill that he described as bipartisan and twice-delivered to the House:
"There is a bipartisan bill that has been sent over from the Senate, not once, but twice. Every single Democrat, every single Republican in the Senate supports that legislation."
That Senate measure, unanimously approved ahead of the Easter recess, takes a two-step approach. It would fund the bulk of DHS but deliberately carves out ICE and Border Patrol. Jeffries cast that exclusion as a feature, not a bug, saying Democrats support the bill so the government can "reopen every other aspect of the Department of Homeland Security, including TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA, and our cybersecurity professionals, while continuing to work on the effort to get ICE under control."
Read that last phrase again: "get ICE under control." For Jeffries, the path to reopening DHS runs through defunding, or at minimum, sidelining, the very agencies responsible for immigration enforcement at the border. That is not an incidental detail. It is the entire dispute.
The House did not simply leave town and ignore the problem. Before the holiday break, the lower chamber passed a short-term funding bill. It also met briefly during a pro forma session after the Senate bill's passage, but hard-line conservatives objected to advancing a measure that excluded ICE and Border Patrol funding.
Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.) pushed back hard on Jeffries's framing. In remarks to Newsmax, Harris said the House had already stayed in Washington, passed a continuing resolution and another funding bill, and sent them to the Senate, all without Democratic support.
"The House was there in Washington. We stayed over. We voted and passed another funding bill... and you couldn't get Democrats to support it."
Harris did not hold back on Jeffries's Sunday appearance, calling it "just more and more of the Democrat propaganda." Whether or not one accepts that characterization, the underlying facts are hard for Democrats to dispute. The House GOP approved a rival DHS funding plan that dared the Senate to act. Democrats chose not to join that effort.
So when Jeffries accuses Johnson of inaction, the obvious reply is: the House voted. Your side said no.
Strip away the Sunday-show posturing and the dispute comes down to a single question: will Congress fund ICE and Border Patrol, or won't it?
Democrats have used the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis as leverage to demand what they call significant reforms to ICE operations before restoring the agency's funding. Republicans see the same demand as an attempt to gut immigration enforcement under the guise of accountability.
Former Freedom Caucus chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) crystallized the conservative position in a post on X last Wednesday:
"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's objection reflects a broader tension inside the GOP conference. Some Republicans oppose the Senate's two-step approach because voting for a bill that funds DHS without ICE or Border Patrol, even temporarily, amounts to a concession they are unwilling to make. The concern is straightforward: once you separate immigration enforcement from the rest of DHS funding, you hand Democrats permanent leverage to keep those agencies starved.
Jeffries has found himself cornered on the ICE question before, caught between a progressive base that wants the agency dismantled and a public that broadly supports border enforcement. His Sunday remarks tried to thread the needle, fund everything except the agencies that actually enforce immigration law, then "work on" ICE later. That formulation should fool no one.
GOP leaders are pursuing a different route: folding ICE and Border Patrol funding into a broader budget reconciliation bill. President Trump endorsed that plan on Wednesday and set a June 1 deadline for the legislation.
Reconciliation would allow Republicans to fund the immigration agencies on their own terms, bypassing the filibuster in the Senate and avoiding the need for Democratic votes. But it is a slower process, and the partial shutdown continues in the meantime. The DHS funding deadlock has only deepened as lawmakers left Washington for recess.
The political risk is real. Every week the shutdown drags on, Democrats get another chance to appear on Sunday shows and blame Republicans for unpaid TSA agents and unfunded disaster relief. Jeffries knows this. His demand that Johnson reconvene the House is less a governing proposal than a messaging strategy designed to shift blame onto the majority party.
Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) offered a slightly more conciliatory tone on Fox News's "Fox News Sunday," saying he was ready to work with Republicans on use-of-force standards and due process. But he also injected a new urgency argument:
"But just making this beltway football is not making the American public safer, and the clock is ticking because we've got the World Cup coming, and we need the FEMA and other security agencies funded for that."
The World Cup deadline is a real operational concern. But it also exposes the absurdity of the Democratic position. If FEMA and security agencies need funding urgently, why did Democrats refuse to support the House's funding bills before recess? The answer, again, is ICE. Democrats would rather let every other DHS function suffer than allow immigration enforcement to proceed without the reforms they want.
Not every Democrat has followed Jeffries's lead. Three House Democrats recently broke with their leader and voted to fund DHS while keeping ICE operational. Those defections suggest the party's strategy of holding homeland security hostage to immigration policy is not universally popular even within its own ranks.
The broader Democratic mood is restless. Sen. Cory Booker recently admitted his party had "failed this moment" and called for new leadership, a sign that the institutional confidence Jeffries projects on television does not match the anxiety inside the caucus.
None of this means Republicans are without fault. The shutdown has stretched past a month, and the reconciliation timeline is uncertain. Hard-line members who refuse any intermediate step make it harder for Johnson to maneuver. But the core dynamic remains: one side wants to fund all of DHS, including the agencies that enforce immigration law. The other side wants to fund everything except those agencies. Voters can decide for themselves which position constitutes "creating chaos."
Both chambers are scheduled to return the week of April 13. Whether Johnson calls lawmakers back earlier remains to be seen. The reconciliation bill, if it holds together, faces a June 1 deadline set by the president.
Several questions remain unanswered. What specific DHS functions beyond the named agencies have been halted during the shutdown? What reforms, exactly, are Democrats demanding before they will fund ICE? And will the Senate's bipartisan bill gain any traction in a House where conservatives view it as a surrender on border enforcement?
Jeffries wants the public to see a reckless Republican majority that went on vacation while the government stayed closed. The record shows something different: a House that voted, a minority that blocked, and a leader who now demands credit for urgency he did nothing to create.
When you defund the cops and then complain about the crime rate, people eventually notice.
