Democrats blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security better hope their constituents don't suddenly face emergencies or disasters. And perhaps soon, hope that they won't need to travel anywhere either.
DHS entered a shutdown this past weekend, thanks to Democrats' demands for an overhaul of immigration enforcement, prompted in part by progressive outrage over two shootings in Minneapolis. However, immigration enforcement has separate funding for the next three years, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill reconciliation package passed last summer. The shutdown affects all other agencies in DHS, however, and today Donald Trump dropped the first shoe on the shutdown:
President Donald Trump's administration has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to suspend the deployment of hundreds of aid workers to disaster-affected areas around the country while the Department of Homeland Security is shut down, internal messages reviewed by Reuters showed.
DHS, which FEMA is part of, entered a partial shutdown on Saturday, but has largely continued to operate since most of its functions are deemed essential. The shutdown happened after Republicans and Democrats failed to reach a deal on immigration enforcement reforms.
"DHS has issued a stop-travel order for all DHS funded travel, effecting 2/18/26, for the duration of the lapse in appropriation. Currently this DOES include disaster travel," according to an internal email sent by Kurt Weirich, a chief of staff at FEMA.
More than 300 FEMA disaster responders were preparing for upcoming assignments but were told to stand down, including some who are currently at a training facility, CNN reported earlier.
The timing on this move couldn't get more acute. The mid-Atlantic region faces the worst wastewater spill in US history, thanks to a sewer-line collapse in Montgomery County, Maryland. The impact has mainly hit the bluest areas of the region in Maryland, DC, and northern Virginia, and Trump had ordered FEMA to mobilize a response on Tuesday. This suspension leaves matters back in the hands of two Democrat governors, especially Maryland governor Wes Moore, who has mishandled this crisis from the start. Moore needed FEMA to rescue him from his own incompetence.
CNN sniffed that the suspension was unnecessary:
The Trump administration has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to suspend the deployment of hundreds of aid workers to disaster-torn areas around the US while the Department of Homeland Security is shut down, according to sources and internal messages obtained by CNN.
The new edict comes even though most deployments are paid for through a Disaster Relief Fund that isn’t affected by the shutdown.
First off, the fund pays for some expenses, but almost certainly not the personnel costs. It also doesn't cover the full operational costs of FEMA, or at least not for long. DHS is husbanding those resources after this order for special authorization on particularly acute emergencies. It's possible that Poop River/'Pootomac' could still get assistance, but for now, all personnel are grounded in place, even those already deployed.
Also, this is what happens in a congressional funding shutdown, as Chuck Schumer should have learned from the broader shutdown in October and November. It hands the keys and the budget to the executive, who then gets to shape exactly how the shutdown manifests in federal services. ICE will continue its current enforcement operations, thanks to truly separate funding for that purpose, although the administration hoped to use that fund to build new detention centers. Everything else in DHS runs at the pleasure of the president now.
That brings us to the likely next shoe: the airline industry. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) provides security at all commercial airports in the US. If they get ordered to stand down, air traffic will come to an immedite halt. That started to take place in the Schumer Shutdown, but that was also driven by the funding cutoff for air traffic control operations, which run under the Department of Transportation. That is now fully funded, but TSA operates under DHS, and it currently has a funding lapse. At least for now, the White House has kept it in operation in the airports, but Trump could suspend those operations at any time now as part of the shutdown. And that will disrupt American commerce for weeks, even if the shutdown is brief.
Democrats are playing with fire, in other words, especially since immigration enforcement continues to be a popular policy. The lack of drama from Minneapolis over the last couple of weeks makes their position on immigration enforcement look even more extreme. If their constituents can't book flights just because Democrats want to go back to the Biden Regency's open-borders policies, they may pay a very steep price for their extremism.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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