Trump demands Congress pass ICE and Border Patrol funding bill by June 1

“We are going forward to fund our incredible ICE Agents and Border Patrol through a process that doesn’t need Radical Left Democrat votes, and bypasses the Senate Filibuster (which should be repealed, IMMEDIATELY!), working in close conjunction with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Leader John Thune,” the president wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post.

“We are going to work as fast, and as focused, as possible to replenish funding for our Border and ICE Agents, and the Radical Left Democrats won’t be able to stop us,” he continued. “We will not allow them to hurt the families of these Great Patriots by defunding them. I am asking that the Bill be on my desk NO LATER than June 1st.”

However, it’s not clear whether the president now supports a Senate-passed funding deal rejected by House Republicans last week. The Senate deal would fund everything under DHS except enforcement and removal operations, meaning that ICE would have to stay afloat with funds from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act until a reconciliation package is passed.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon that Congress would be pursuing a two-track approach to funding DHS: appropriations and reconciliation.

“In following this two-track approach, the Republican Congress will fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited,” the pair said. “In return, Democrats will once again demonstrate to the American people their support for open borders and keeping criminal illegal immigrants in America.”

Johnson and Thune noted that the Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had already started crafting a budget framework to pursue a second reconciliation bill that will fund border security and immigration enforcement for the remainder of Trump’s second term.

“We operated under a belief that while our country is in the midst of an international armed conflict, Democrats might finally come to their senses and understand that defunding our homeland security agencies is beyond reckless and very dangerous,” the duo wrote. “We cannot allow Democrats to any longer put the safety of the American public at risk through their open border policies, so we are taking that off the table.”

Johnson had criticized the Senate deal as a “joke” last week, saying he was “quite convinced that it can’t be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill.”

House Republicans ultimately passed a 60-day funding patch for DHS instead of moving forward with the Senate’s bill, but the legislation was dead on arrival in the upper chamber because Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) does not have the votes to break a filibuster.

Trump has repeatedly called for the Senate to kill the filibuster; however, Thune has maintained there is not enough support in his conference to remove the procedure.

Both chambers of Congress left Washington last Friday for a two-week recess, meaning that any effort to fund DHS before mid-April would require GOP leadership to cancel the remainder of their break to return to Capitol Hill.

Trump has encouraged GOP leadership to do so, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters Monday that he was “encouraging” lawmakers to “come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely.”

However, a Senate GOP aide previously told the Washington Examiner that Thune had informed his conference in a note over the weekend that he would not bring them back to Washington for a “show vote,” and would only do so if legislation had the necessary votes to pass.

THUNE UNDER PRESSURE TO END TWO-WEEK VACATION AMID RECORD-LONG DHS SHUTDOWN

The GOP aide went on to say that the “quickest” way to reopen the agency would be for the House to pass the Senate’s DHS funding deal.