The Department of Homeland Security ran out of money on Saturday. Did anyone notice? Probably not, unless you had to travel and see TSA.

As our informed readers will remember, the Democrats insisted that the DHS funding bill could not be passed “as is,” because they wanted more “guardrails” and restrictions on ICE. So the rest of the spending bills were passed at the end of January, but the DHS funding bill got a two week extension. Those two weeks ended on Saturday morning.

But as the clock wound down, John Fetterman pointed out an unpleasant truth to Democrats. For all their grandstanding, ICE operations are continuing on and fully funded, thanks to the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill last July.

Shutting DHS down has zero impact and zero changes for ICE.

ICE already has $75B in funding from the BBB that I did not vote for.

But it will hit FEMA, Coast Guard, TSA and our Cybersecurity Agency.

As a Democrat, I can’t vote to shut down critical parts of our government. pic.twitter.com/QYasx0LwCo

— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) February 12, 2026

Well, here we are, Democrats. ICE is still completely functional, but TSA employees are not getting paid. Way to go!

Employees of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), which is housed within DHS, are working without pay as of early Saturday morning — when the funding lapse began.

According to DHS’s shutdown contingency plan published in September, just more than 95 percent of TSA employees are exempt and will remain on board during the shutdown. The remaining workers, an estimated 2,933 out of 64,130, were furloughed.

This time around, air traffic controllers are working with pay, as they fall under the Federal Aviation Administration — which is part of the Department of Transportation, not DHS. But Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting TSA administrator, warned last week that the shutdown will still impact air travel.

“Many [TSA officers] work paycheck to paycheck trying to support themselves and their families,” McNeill said in front of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. “During a shutdown, the ability to pay for rent, bills, groceries, child care, and gas just to get to work becomes very challenging, leading to increased unscheduled absences as a shutdown progresses.

“Higher callouts can result in longer wait times at checkpoints, leading to missed or delayed flights, which has a cascading negative impact on the American economy.”

And TSA employees know that they are paying the price for the political ignorance surrounding this issue.

“It’s tragic. You have people that have families to feed, bills to pay and we just came off a 43-day shutdown and here we are again,” said Andrew Cardoso with the AFGE Local 1260.

Cardoso supports TSA agents throughout Northern California via the AFGE union.

He also works at the Oakland airport.

He says he and his fellow agents are still recovering financially from the last shutdown.

“People are just feeling defeated. This is not something we should even have to face,” Cardoso said. “Ultimately this has nothing to do with us. It’s an ICE issue.”

Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired at midnight Saturday, after lawmakers failed to reach a deal on Democrats proposed restrictions on federal immigration enforcement.

Some travelers NBC Bay Area spoke to say they’re willing to suffer through longer lines if it means new restrictions on ICE.

“I don’t care, shut it down, shut down the government. What the government is doing is completely illegal,” said Russell Friend, a traveler.

How very kind of Russell Friend to be willing to wait in longer lines, while the TSA worker doesn’t get a paycheck, because Russell Friend is a reactionary tool who didn’t listen to John Fetterman. And of course he won’t listen to Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who pointed out that the Democrats aren’t making anything safer, or stopping ICE, by not funding DHS.

“What is actually happening right now with the Democrat Party by this political theater, by shutting down DHS for something that you even admitted yourself can’t be done. They’re not stopping [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] from doing their job,” Mullin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“They’re not stopping the Border Patrol from doing their job. All this is a political theater because the State of the Union is coming up a week from Tuesday, because, if this was really a serious conversation, they wouldn’t be holding the [Transportation Security Administration] workers or [Federal Emergency Management Agency] or the Coast Guard hostage over something that cannot be done by the ridiculous shutdown of DHS,” he added.

Will Democrats really hold out until after the State of the Union address on February 24th to finally pass a funding bill for DHS, as Mullin suspects? I am sure they wish to use all the optics that have come out of Minneapolis to make their points during a State of the Union rebuttal speech. But… what if there are no more big ICE incidents? Tom Homan has already announced that the ICE surge in Minnesota has come to an end, and said on Sunday that a “small force” will remain in the state to make sure that nothing escalates again. But the large “Operation Metro Surge” has come to a close. The American public has the attention span of a moth drawn to a flame, and once the flame goes out, their attention will go elsewhere. The State of the Union is still 8 days away. A quiet 8 days for ICE, while TSA workers go without a paycheck – not to mention FEMA, the Coast Guard (which has been very busy lately), and others within DHS – will speak louder than Democrats can during a rebuttal speech.

And because the rest of government will keep operating normally, will anyone else even notice this shutdown, unless they have to travel? If there’s a shutdown and no one notices, did the Democrats actually accomplish anything? And what if there should be a natural disaster that requires FEMA attention, and FEMA is closed down? Democrats better be praying to whatever they believe in that they won’t get caught in a political backlash that could cost them, just because they wanted to try and spite President Trump, and pretend that they were sticking it to ICE by denying DHS their funding.

Featured image via ClickerHappy on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license