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The US House of Representatives has voted narrowly to end the partial government shutdown, while setting up another funding cliff for the Department of Homeland Security amid a fight over Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The Republican controlled House voted 217-214 on Tuesday afternoon to reopen parts of the federal government whose funding had lapsed at the weekend. The US president was expected to sign the bill into law to end the shutdown later in the day.
While the legislation will fund significant parts of the federal government through the end of September, it also sets the stage for fraught negotiations over DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under the terms of the deal, funding for DHS is set to run out on February 13.
Democratic lawmakers in the House and the Senate have threatened to withhold future funding for DHS without significant changes to the way the Trump administration carries out immigration enforcement, following the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of law enforcement in Minneapolis.
Good and Pretti’s killings sparked outrage across the country and piled pressure on the White House as the public recoiled at the White House’s heavy-handed mass deportation efforts.
In the past week, the White House has signalled a willingness to change its tactics.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on Monday said “effective immediately . . . every officer in the field in Minneapolis” would wear a body camera.
The body camera programme would be expanded across the country “as funding is available”, she said in a post on X.
Trump later said the body camera requirement was not his “decision”, but he added: “It tends to be good for law enforcement because people can’t lie about what happened.”
Tuesday’s vote in the House came after a tense 24 hours of negotiations between the White House and hardline congressional Republicans who had threatened to withhold support for the funding deal while demanding a vote on proposals for tighter voter ID laws.
The Senate had passed its version of the bill on Friday.
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