Washington Wednesday: The Minnesota standoff

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 28th of January. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

Well, now that a second person has died at the hands of federal agents in Minnesota, Democrats on Capitol Hill are holding up the government funding process just days ahead of another deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown. 

WORLD's Carolina Lumetta has more from the Capitol.

CAROLINA LUMETTA: Just five days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican appropriators celebrated the passage of the final batch of government funding bills for this fiscal year.

JOHNSON: This is a monumental achievement, and I think everyone in this room understands what has just been done here.

In the past 30 years, Congress has funded the government with massive omnibus bills that bundle appropriations and other measures together. Speaker Johnson has largely made good on his promise to get back to single issue funding bills, if several months late. 

Six of the 12 appropriations bills have already passed both chambers and been signed into law. The remaining six were sent to the Senate as a “minibus” last week.

JOHNSON: The House has now passed all 12 appropriations bills and the Senate will soon do the same, and the president is going to sign them into law. What a concept, gentlemen.

But now one of the bills in that package has become a sticking point. Democratic senators are threatening to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security in response to the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota. 

Here’s Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar on Sunday:

KLOBUCHAR: As members of Congress, we are calling on this administration to get ICE out of our towns, off of our streets. It will make us more safe. We, as a congressional group up here, strongly opposed the ICE funding this week.

Denying that funding would affect other DHS agencies, including FEMA and TSA. 

Back in the House, lawmakers from both parties rejected the White House’s request to increase DHS funding from $64 billion to $175 billion. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on social media over the weekend that Senate Democrats have enough votes to block the entire bill.

But that would not necessarily freeze ICE out of funding. The Big Beautiful Bill passed last year already gave ICE nearly $20 billion per year for the next 4 years.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that the president wants to see all the bills pass this week, including the DHS compromise.

LEAVITT: At this point, the White House supports the bipartisan work that was done to advance the bipartisan appropriations package, and we want to see that passed. Policy discussions on immigration in Minnesota are happening.

For their part, Republicans are also expressing concern. The chairs of both the House and Senate Homeland Security committees have demanded immediate hearings with officials from DHS, ICE, Citizen and Immigration Services, and Customs and Border Protection. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March.

If the Senate changes anything in the appropriations bills this week, the House will have to vote again on the revised bill, and it is out of session until Monday. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune agrees to split the minibus into 6 pieces, Democrats have said they will vote to pass everything but DHS funding.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta.

MAST: Joining us now to talk more about it is political scientist Hunter Baker. He is a WORLD Opinions Contributor. Good morning Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

MAST: Well Hunter, the fight over DHS funding is clearly not settled. How do you see this shaking out? And does it even matter, given that ICE has money from the Big Beautiful Bill from last year?

BAKER: I think it's less about having the money to operate than it is about the opportunity for sort of a showdown in the Senate. I think the Democrats were deeply unsatisfied, especially the base, with the way the last shutdown ended, not really extracting any concessions. And now here's the real opportunity. 

Now, in the normal course of events, I would have guessed that this might go through more smoothly, but now you've had real political theater with devastating consequences in Minneapolis. And with two people dying, it's a perfect opportunity for Democrats in the Senate to say, "We're not going to pass the DHS budget unless we have some sort of clear oversight. We rewrite the law, we change the operating procedures, something." So they've got a lot of political wind behind them, and I'm not sure the Republicans will be able to just say, "No, we're going through with the whole package or nothing."

EICHER: Now we're going to leave some time to talk more about Minneapolis, but we did also hear in Carolina’s report that what the House accomplished is pretty significant historically or at least in recent years. Maybe it's just a big sign of the dysfunction that we've been living with, but the fact is that the House actually passed every appropriations bill for the first time in three decades. So we’re talking, this goes back to the Bill Clinton administration with Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. This is significant, is it not, Hunter? 

BAKER: It's a very impressive achievement by the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, especially given the ultra slender majority with which he is operating. I mean, there's just just tremendous discipline, it's really good work. To some extent it's a shame that it's going to prove to be a lot rockier ground in the Senate, but I do want to say, I think that the House should be congratulated for this good work and I hope it's a sign of returning to the more traditional kind of budgetary order that we've had in the past.

MAST: Well turning back to Minnesota, Hunter, a federal judge there has ordered the acting head of ICE to appear in court—personally—this week to explain why he should not be held in contempt.

Judge Patrick Schiltz says ICE has repeatedly violated court orders tied to the administration’s immigration surge in Minnesota. He’s called the extent of those violations “extraordinary,” and he’s warning that the court’s patience has run out.

The order comes amid a flood of cases tied to federal immigration enforcement. That includes challenges over detainee transfers, evidence preservation, and whether the federal presence itself has crossed constitutional lines.

So just one more major development in this incredibly tense standoff between the Trump administration and state and local officials there in Minnesota.

Where do you see things standing at this moment, Hunter?

BAKER: I'm not on the inside of ICE, so I have to try to look at the situation and figure out what's going on. Now, the word that you use that I would focus on is "flood," a flood of cases. I think that when you're dealing with the incredibly huge number of people who have come over the border, and, the number who may appeal to the right of due process in the course of resisting deportation, is very large. And so I would not be surprised if the agency and its leadership is overwhelmed with all that they're trying to manage and deal with, not only on the sort of legal, court side of things, but also with regard to these large scale actions in places like Minneapolis. 

So I suspect that they're not just being recalcitrant, but they may actually, to some degree, be overwhelmed.

EICHER: I do want to pick up on that word "overwhelmed" though, Hunter, because I think that's what we're seeing at the White House; certainly a rattled White House making these dramatic personnel changes on the immigration issue. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, she's been pulled off the day-to-day oversight of the operation. Border czar and former ICE director Tom Homan is now effectively in charge on the ground. Homan reporting directly the president, even though Kristi Noem is his boss; that is very significant.

But you could feel the ground shifting ... days of clashes between federal agents and protesters. And again that second fatal shooting, not to mention what we just talked about with the federal judge.

So Hunter, how much trouble do you think Kristi Noem is in at Homeland Security? And you know, to be fair to her, is she just being set up here to be the administration’s fall guy or fall girl here?

BAKER: Well, there's political theater and there's governmental effectiveness, and I think that both of those things are coming together with regard to this situation. 

So on the one hand, when things go badly, the public expects accountability. They expect, you know, somebody to pay a price, and in this case, I think it's Kristi Noem and maybe those who are tightly tied to her. And at the same time, showing that he's doing something about it, Trump is putting Tom Homan in charge. And I think that not only is that kind of a good symbolic move for the public, but I think it's actually a good move in terms of just operating effectiveness. 

Homan has a long record of doing really well with the border and immigration. Did well in the Obama Administration, has done well with Trump and has ascended to this role, and I think it's good that he's in charge. 

And the other thing I want to say is, we've seen a report in The Wall Street Journal that there's been a divide between Homan and Noem, and maybe Stephen Miller, over what's the right approach. Homan has favored going after those with criminal records, whereas Miller and Noem have been more interested in these kind of large scale actions. 

Well, now that things have gone badly in Minneapolis, it's strengthened Homan's hand, and I think we're going to move more in that direction of going after criminals, which I think is going to be more popular with the public at large.

MAST: Well Hunter, I want to go back to the clashes Nick referenced a moment ago. The president had suggested recently he could use the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, allowing him to use the military or National Guard in law enforcement. 

Now I know you don’t favor that, we’ve talked about it before because it would likely only increase tensions in a very tense situation to begin with. But go with me here for a second … Minnesota stands out for how vehemently protestors have interacted with federal law enforcement. So I still can’t help but wonder… if the federal officers move out, doesn’t that reward this violent resistance?

BAKER: Yeah, and I think that's something that's worth worrying about. I think that a lot of people in Minneapolis, people in responsible positions, have acted quite badly. I think that the governor has acted badly. I think that a number of other elected officials have acted badly. I think that the governor, referring to the Gestapo and comparing this situation to the case of Anne Frank, who died in the Holocaust, is completely out of bounds and in poor taste and inflaming people. So I think that all of that is bad. 

And then on top of that, yeah, let's talk about the Insurrection Act. You, if you go back and you look at it, one of the clear elements within law has to do with combinations of people who are acting to prevent the enforcement of federal law. That's happening; we've seen that, we've heard about kind of the Signal chats and the coordination. And this is not just simple protests. There has been intimidation and confrontation. 

So legally, I think that the definition is there, I think that somebody could act on that. But you, you have to have the support of the public when it comes to carrying out your agenda, and I am worried that if the Trump administration sort of invoked the Insurrection Act and started prosecuting people, that things would actually get worse rather than better. 

You want to keep your base, but you always have to worry about the people in the middle as well. And the people in the middle are the people who are alarmed by actions that they think are too extreme, or if the tone is wrong, or things like that. That's not just squishiness when we talk about things like that; that's where we start talking about winning or losing, and we need to always remember that politics has to do with winning, not losing.

MAST: Hunter Baker is a WORLD Opinions contributor and provost at North Greenville University. Thank you so much, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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