Why Democrats have little leverage to reform ICE
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, immigration policy correspondent Ximena Bustillo, congressional reporter Sam Gringlas and White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Sam Greenglass. I cover Congress. |
| 0:09.8 | And I'm Jimenez-Bustillo and I cover immigration. And it's Friday. So let's catch up on some of the political news we haven't already talked about on the pod, starting with an ongoing fight over funding at the Department of Homeland Security. Sam, this is an agency |
| 0:22.1 | that has been without funding for more than 60 days now. Can you give us the latest? |
| 0:27.4 | Yeah, I feel like a lot of people maybe have forgotten that this agency is still shut down and that |
| 0:31.8 | this fight is ongoing, and it very much is. So there was an agreement in the Senate at least to fund all of DHS except for |
| 0:42.0 | immigration enforcement agencies, ICE and border patrol. This passed the Senate, but it has been |
| 0:49.0 | sitting in the House for the last three weeks amid pushback from inside the House Republican caucus |
| 0:55.7 | who don't like this idea of carving out the immigration enforcement agencies and handling them |
| 1:00.8 | later in a party line vote and who also want to stick a lot of other stuff into that |
| 1:04.6 | offensual party line vote. So there's conflict there and three weeks after a supposed deal |
| 1:09.4 | to end this thing, we are still in the middle of this fight. |
| 1:12.7 | Hamanu, you cover the Department of Homeland Security. Tell us a little bit more about the impacts that we're feeling at this point. |
| 1:18.2 | Yeah. I mean, it's probably very normal for the average person to, as Sam said, forgot that this was sort of happening. |
| 1:26.9 | You can go to the airport and you still see |
| 1:29.2 | TSA that's there. And then like maybe you remember that TSA is also a part of Homeland Security while |
| 1:33.6 | you're doing that. But I think it's important to remember that for a while those TSA agents were not |
| 1:39.5 | getting paid. And then President Trump signed a memo, authorizing, you know, particular federal funds to get moved over to streamline the pay and then signed a separate memo to then start paying the rest of the department. |
| 1:52.6 | And we're talking about 250,000 people that work for DHS. |
| 2:00.4 | Now, there are other potential impacts, so TSA is getting paid, |
| 2:05.5 | but yesterday the TSA administrator testified that the agency is preparing to lose even more workers |
| 2:12.7 | as the shutdown drags on. And attrition is something that TSA has particularly seen in the last six |
| 2:19.7 | months because there's not just the shutdown, but the one from the fall as well. And she said that |
... |
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