Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who helped craft and backed the Homeland Security funding bill now fueling a standoff in the Senate, said in an interview Tuesday that he supports putting more guardrails on federal immigration enforcement agencies but urged senators to pass the legislation the House approved last week.
The partial government shutdown senators are barreling toward after Saturday’s DHS-involved killing of a Minneapolis man, he warned, would be “the worst situation,” leaving the controversial agencies operating with “a blank check.”
“If you have a government shutdown, what really happens? ICE got $75 billion in the big-beautiful-slash-ugly bill. [But] you shut down FEMA, you shut down TSA, you shut down the Coast Guard, you shut down CISA,” the moderate Texas lawmaker said. “I don’t think that’s a good alternative.”
Cuellar, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said he supports many strictures that got left on the cutting room floor in the House, including banning agents from wearing masks and requiring identification, codifying parts of the agency’s use of force policy and notifying Congress about large surges in ICE activity.
But he suggested those could be revisited in the next yearly funding cycle if Democrats are unable to secure commitments from Republicans before the shutdown deadline. And he said there are steps the Trump administration could take now to defuse tensions, such as increasing training and enforcing ICE’s internal use-of-force policy.
“I sense an opening where I think we can get more Republicans to work with us,” Cuellar said.
Amid bipartisan backlash to Alex Pretti’s killing, Senate Democrats are seeking to strip the DHS funding bill from a larger six-bill appropriations package and renegotiate it. They’re seeking a raft of new provisions, including requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, mandating federal agents identify themselves and compelling DHS to cooperate with state and local investigations.
But Republicans are scrambling to avoid making changes to the massive bill as the Friday midnight deadline for a partial government shutdown approaches. With the House out till next week, passing the funding package intact is the only viable path to avoiding a shutdown.
Cuellar joined his fellow Democrats and many Republicans in calling for independent investigations into the shootings of both Pretti and Renee Good, who was also killed in a confrontation with a DHS officer. And he didn’t rule out joining House Democrats’ push to impeach DHS Secretary Kristi Noem if President Donald Trump doesn’t fire her first.
“I’ll wait until a later time” to weigh in, Cuellar said. “But I’m certainly looking at everything that’s going on, and [Trump and his team] definitely need to change course on it.”
