The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – which includes agencies that oversee immigration enforcement and disaster response – is expected to run out of funds after legislators failed to avert a partial government shutdown.
The Senate adjourned on Friday without reaching a deal to pass budget legislation for DHS. The House of Representatives, meanwhile, had started its weeklong recess on Thursday evening.
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That leaves a DHS shutdown all but inevitable when the funding expires at midnight in Washington, DC, on Saturday (05: 00 GMT).
The impasse was spurred, in part, by the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, which resulted in the killing of two US citizens in January.
Reports had emerged of masked immigration agents threatening bystanders and using violence disproportionately.
On February 4, Democratic leaders in Congress issued a list of demands to reform Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that falls under the DHS.
The demands included banning ICE agents from wearing masks to conceal their identities, prohibiting racial profiling and ending immigration raids on “sensitive locations” like schools and churches.
Without such “common sense reforms”, the Democrats threatened to withhold their votes from any funding legislation for DHS.
But President Donald Trump’s Republican Party has rejected the Democrats’ demands, calling them unreasonable.
Republicans control both the Senate and the House. But a legislative rule in the Senate, known as the filibuster, requires lawmakers to reach a 60-vote threshold to pass major legislation.
On Thursday, the 100-seat Senate only saw 52 votes in favour of the funding legislation, with 47 opposed. Nearly all the chamber’s Democrats, save Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, stood united to block the bill.
“The Republican bill on the floor allows ICE to smash in doors without warrants, to wear masks and not be identified, to use children as bait for their parents,” top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said in a video message before the vote.
“We are keeping our word: No funding for ICE until it is reined in, until the violence ends.”
By Friday, many legislators in both chambers had already left Washington. Some, like Senator Mark Kell