WASHINGTON — Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump threw cold water on their efforts to cut a deal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, Senate Republicans intensified their bid Tuesday to find an off-ramp to the impasse amid staggeringly long lines at airports across the country.

Under a proposal they sent to Democrats on Tuesday afternoon, Congress would fund all of the department except for parts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement involved in the administration’s deportation crackdown, according to multiple people familiar with the plan. It was not clear what, if any, enforcement limits were included, or if Democrats, who have insisted on reining in federal immigration agents’ tactics, would go along with it.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, said that the proposal would fund 94% of the Department of Homeland Security. But he suggested that the limits that Democrats have demanded, which include barring immigration agents from wearing masks and requiring that they seek judicial warrants to enter private homes and businesses, would not be included because the bill would not fund ICE’s immigration enforcement operations.

“A lot of the reforms are contingent on funding for ICE,” Thune said. He added, “If you’re not going to have funding, I don’t know how all of a sudden now you can demand reforms.”

A spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, said he had made it clear to his members and to Republicans that only removing the ICE enforcement money without any other changes would not be enough to earn the support of his members.

The proposal has not changed since the weekend, when Trump publicly rejected any spending deal and said he would not accept one unless the Senate delivered him the strict voter ID bill, paired with restrictions on transgender athletes and children, that the chamber is now considering.

Trump Didn’t Endorse the Idea

At the White House on Tuesday, Trump did not endorse the idea, saying that he wanted to take a “good, hard look” at the deal and “support Republicans,” but sounding cool to any compromise with Democrats.

“Any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with,” the president said of the GOP.

Several Republican senators closely aligned with Trump pitched him on the proposal in a meeting Monday night at the White House. They said they would work on a separate bill to address election security and ICE funding, which they would seek to push through without Democratic support using a special process called budget reconciliation that is not subject to a filibuster, according to two of the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss the negotiations. (Because Republicans gave ICE a vast windfall as part of Trump’s sweeping domestic policy law last year, the agency has continued to operate during the shutdown.)

After the meeting, Senate Republicans sounded sanguine about the prospects of a deal, even as some on the hard right raised alarm about it. Thune said Tuesday that he believed those who had met with Trump “made a compelling case and argument for why this is a big win.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Appropriations Committee, which oversees spending bills, said that she had grown “more optimistic that by the end of the week we will fund the Department of Homeland Security.”

Lawmakers cautioned that conversations were continuing, and the plan under discussion would face significant hurdles. But it had the potential to end a stalemate that has dragged on for nearly a month and has led to chaos at U.S. airports, giving senators an escape hatch before a scheduled two-week recess.

Overcoming the 60-Vote Threshold

To overcome the 60-vote threshold required to advance most legislation, the funding bill would require some Democratic buy-in. So far, Democrats have been resolutely opposed to legislation that does not contain new guardrails on immigration enforcement efforts, a demand that hardened after federal agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis in January.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with Democrats and was part of bipartisan talks last week, said Monday that he needed to see the legislative text and how ICE’s detention and deportation operations were carved out of it. Republicans said they expected to send legislative text to Democrats on Tuesday afternoon.

“I want to see exactly what that means and how it’s — what the language is,” King said. “And there may be some negotiation on exactly how to define that, but I’m just waiting. As I say, the first step is to see the actual deal.”

Any separate ICE bill passed under reconciliation would also require near-unanimous Republican support, and lawmakers in both the House and Senate have been skeptical that the party could unite behind legislation, particularly in an election year.

And that legislation would have to fit within the strict rules tied to the reconciliation process, which can only be used to pass provisions that make direct changes to government spending or revenues. It was not clear how the voter ID legislation, which would also require proof of citizenship when registering to vote, or limits on transgender people could qualify.

The House Freedom Caucus, an ultraconservative group, called the Senate plan “failure theater,” warning in a social media post that it was unlikely to succeed in pushing through Trump’s election measures, which he has called a top priority.

“It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation,” Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the Republican sponsor of the measure, said in a post on the social platform X. “And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael Gold/Kenny Holston
c. 2026 The New York Times Company