After 42 days of infighting on Capitol Hill and growing security lines at airports, the Senate early Friday morning approved a bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, marking an initial but major step toward ending the shutdown at the sprawling agency.

The chamber cleared the legislation by unanimous consent after 2 a.m., though there’s still a ways to go before the lights turn on again at DHS. The House would have to approve the bill, which might not happen, and Donald Trump would have to sign it — a never-sure thing with this temperamental president who signaled opposition to any deal just earlier this week.

“Obviously we’ll still have some work ahead of us,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said early Friday morning as he went to the floor.

The bill the Senate passed would fund all of DHS through the end of the fiscal year with some major exceptions: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operations at Customs and Border Protection. Republicans would look to fund those agencies through the party-line budget reconciliation process — a strategy that would bypass the need for Democratic votes but is also not a sure thing.

Still, the Senate vote marked a win for Democrats, who had refused to approve additional funding for ICE without new guardrails following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January — a standoff that triggered the six-weeks-and-counting shutdown.

The final deal, however, largely reflects Democrats’ long-standing position: Split off ICE funding, and they would support the rest of DHS.

“In the wake of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Senate Democrats were clear: No blank check for a lawless ICE and Border Patrol,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the floor Friday morning.

Conveniently for Republicans, ICE still has money from the GOP reconciliation bill that passed last summer, so operations can continue uninterrupted even if those agencies don’t get funded in this measure.

In another victory for Republicans, the package doesn’t include any of the reforms Democrats sought and GOP lawmakers opposed, such as a requirement that federal agents remove their masks and obtain judicial warrants before entering homes and businesses. Republicans argued that if Democrats weren’t funding those parts of DHS, they shouldn’t get to make changes at those agencies.

“The reforms were all laid out to say, for funding — if we’re doing the full funding, we’re also doing reforms,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said this week. “If they’re coming back and saying, ‘Oh no, now we changed our mind. Now we want all the reforms, and we don’t want to fund [enforcement and removal operations],’ they’re asking for their cake and eating it too.”

“The proposals that were there for the reforms were based on if we’re also funding all areas,” Lankford said.

Despite not securing any reforms, Schumer framed the outcome as a victory for Democrats. “Throughout it all, Senate Democrats stood united, no wavering, no backing down. We held the line,” he said Friday.

The agreement came together after a chaotic week of starts and stops in negotiations, complicated by Trump repeatedly signaling opposition to any bipartisan deal.

Meanwhile, the real-world impact of the shutdown intensified. DHS employees missed paychecks, and airport security lines stretched longer, amplifying the pressure on lawmakers.

As videos of long airport lines spread, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was directing his new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, “to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports.”

Trump had already deployed ICE agents to airports across the country to try to curb long security lines.

The bill now heads to the House, where its fate is uncertain.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has resisted splitting DHS funding, with the speaker as recently as Thursday refusing to commit to putting the package on the floor.

“We’ll have to see,” he told MS NOW.

“We have never been in favor of breaking the bill up,” he later added.

Other House Republicans share his concerns, with some of them warning that this maneuver could set a dangerous precedent for appropriations.

“When you start splitting things off, it’s going to give the Democrats more leverage in the future, and I guarantee you, they will hang that around the necks of the American people as well in the future,” said Rep. Mark Alford, R-Mo., a member of the House Appropriations Committee.

Plenty of Republicans are also clear-eyed about the challenge of funding ICE and CBP through reconciliation, which will require near-unanimous GOP support. Republicans are also considering tacking on Iran war funding and elements of the SAVE America Act — the GOP’s elections reform bill — to a reconciliation package, which could further complicate the effort.

For now, though, passage of the Senate deal was a major step forward toward ending the shutdown at DHS — as long as House Republicans, House Democrats and the president can get behind the deal.

Some Democrats have already signaled that this agreement won’t be good enough for them.

“My understanding is that there’s no reforms proposed, so that’s not going to fly,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters earlier this week.

Asked Friday morning if he cleared the package with the House, Thune said he didn’t know “what the House will do.”

“The House is aware of what we’re contemplating, I think, and I think they’re probably anxious to take this up any more than — you know, this time of the day, on a Friday,” he added.

Thune said he texted with Johnson overnight.

But by Friday morning, the prospect of the House passing the bill was already in doubt. The No. 4 Republican in the House, Conference Chair Lisa McClain of Michigan, told NOTUS that the Senate bill was “garbage” and that it wouldn’t be getting a vote in the House.

House Republicans plan to discuss the legislation this afternoon. And even if leaders get behind the deal, there are some quirky House rules that could still complicate passage.

Typically, to pass the legislation, House Republicans would first adopt a rule to set up floor debate. That vote is usually party-line, with Democrats uniformly opposed to the rule. But for this bill, some Republicans might also oppose the rule, stopping the legislation from ever getting to the floor.

Johnson could try to pass the bill through suspension of the rules, which would allow him to bring the bill to the floor without a resolution setting up the terms of debate. But that would require a two-thirds majority to pass the bill — which Johnson might not have if not enough Democrats get on board.

There’s also the matter of Johnson trying to pass a “suspension bill” later in the week. House rules usually dictate that suspension bills can only pass on Mondays or Tuesdays — meaning that Johnson would have to figure out a way to change those rules. (Normally, Republicans would extend suspension authority, but that would require adopting another rule, which may face the same vote problems as just adopting a rule to set up floor debate on the bill anyway.)

If Johnson and Republicans get behind the Senate bill, the easiest solution might be for the House to wait until Monday to end the shutdown, but that would require keeping lawmakers in town over the weekend ahead of a two-week recess.

For tough votes, Johnson usually turns to Trump to convert skeptics to supporters. This time around, however, it’s unclear whether the president would be willing to play the closer.

On Sunday, Trump said on Truth Social, “I don’t think we should make any deal” with Democrats until they get behind the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID at the polls. Democrats are adamantly opposed to that legislation.

On a phone call with Thune that same day, three sources told MS NOW, Trump rejected the plan that was passed Friday morning.

On Monday, after a meeting at the White House, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Republicans on the Senate floor that Trump was indeed supportive of the proposal. But on Thursday, Trump threw more doubt into the equation.

“Any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it,” he told reporters.

But speaking to reporters after the bill passed the Senate early Friday morning, Thune was hopeful Trump would come on board.

“I hope so,” he said when MS NOW asked if the president would ultimately sign the bill. “I never speak for him, but I think he understood where we were, where the Democrats were, which is why he took steps earlier today to deal with the TSA at least temporarily until this hopefully gets across the finish line. So yeah, hope so, we’ll see.”

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