House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked point-blank by a CNN host if the government shutdown was really about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or if it was just a negotiating tactic. The Senate once again failed to bring the partial government shutdown to an end last week as Democrats withheld their votes, continuing to leave workers with the Transportation Security Administration without pay.
Jeffries appeared on a recent episode of “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” where guest host Phil Mattingly went head-to-head with Jeffries by asking him directly about ICE policy and the role it was playing in current negotiations. The New York Democrat tap-danced around the question posed by Mattingly to avoid giving a straight answer.
“Is this about ICE, or is this purely a negotiating mechanism, a vehicle, to get the negotiation that you want on ICE restrictions?” Mattingly asked Jeffries during the interview. Jeffries replied by launching an attack against the previous GOP Congress and by accusing ICE of having billions of dollars in slush funds. “ICE has a $75 billion slush fund that was part of the Republican One Big Ugly bill,” Jeffries started off.
“That was enacted by Republican-only votes last year, where at the same time they ripped Medicaid away from the American people and stole food from the mouths of hungry children, seniors, and veterans with a $186 billion cut to nutritional assistance. So there’s a continuing fight about policy priorities,” Jeffries continued, according to the Daily Caller.
The Senate Minority Leader then continued to slam Republicans, saying that the GOP leverage TSA operations and air travelers in the ongoing debate about illegal immigration. “House Democrats believe that taxpayer dollars should be spent to make life more affordable for the American people, not to brutalize and kill American citizens or violently target law-abiding immigrant families,” Jeffries continued.
At the same period of time, we want Republicans to stop holding TSA agents and air travelers hostage to their extreme immigration [policies],” Jeffries then added. Democrats utilized the filibuster in order to push for new restrictions on ICE operations by preventing money from being used to fund the Department of Homeland Security, citing the shootings of anti-ICE agitators Alex Pretti and Renee Good as a reason for the move.
The only Democrat to vote in favor of the full-year appropriations bill for DHS was Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). Fetterman also fully backed billionaire tech guru Elon Musk’s offer to pay TSA agents’ salaries and went on to drop the hammer on Democrats for leaving employees dependent on food pantries and community donations. “I was the only Democrat through this entire thing to refuse to shut our government down,” Fetterman said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren.
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“This is wrong. Now you can want to reform ICE. That’s reasonable, now, but it has no impact on that directly,” Fetterman added. President Donald Trump decided he had enough and went around Jeffries through an executive order to provide funding for DHS. Trump announced the move in a post on Truth Social, saying,“…I will soon sign an order to pay ALL of the incredible employees at the Department of Homeland Security. Their families have suffered for too long.”
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video