February 13, 2026

February 13th, 2026.

At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of Homeland

Security or DHS will shut down as popular fury over the violence and lawlessness of

federal agents from immigration and customs enforcement or ICE, and the U.S. Border Patrol

made Senate Democrats refuse to agree to fund DHS without reforms.

And yet, because the Republicans lavished money on ICE and Border Patrol in their July

2025 budget reconciliation bill, the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, those

agencies will continue to operate.

The 260,000 federal employees affected by the partial shutdown will come from other agencies

in DHS, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, the Transportation Security

Agency or TSA, and the Coast Guard.

A measure to fund DHS passed the House by a majority vote, but in the Senate, the

filibuster allows the Democrats, who are in the minority, to make demands before the

measure can pass.

On February 4th, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, and House

Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, a Democrat of New York, sent Senate Majority Leader John

Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana,

a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure to appropriate

more funds for the Department of Homeland Security.

Those demands are pretty straightforward.

The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant,

as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials

themselves could sign off on raids, a decision that runs a foul of legal interpretations

of the Fourth Amendment.

They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique

ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do.

They want an end to racial profiling, that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis

of their skin color, place of employment, or language, and to raids of so-called sensitive

sites, medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and

courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable policy for use of force and to be removed

during an investigation if they violate it.

They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those

governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law.

They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards as any detention facility,

and for detainees to have access to their lawyers.

They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress

members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability, but prohibited for gathering and storing information

about protesters.

And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement,

not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are common sense measures that protect Americans

constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement and should apply to all federal

activity even without Democrats demanding them.

Democrats said White House offers were insufficient to address their concerns, although the White

House did not make its position public.

Before they left Washington yesterday for a 10-day break, senators refused to fund DHS

in its current state.

Before the vote, administration officials appeared to try to soften the image of the federal

agents who have terrorized Americans, arrested citizens and legal immigrants, as well as

undocumented immigrants, and shot people.

Trump's immigration adviser Tom Holman, who took over in Minneapolis after Border Patrol

agents acting under the leadership of then-commander Greg Bavino, shot and killed a second American

citizen in that city, told reporters yesterday that the administration will end its surge

of federal agents into Minneapolis, saying it had achieved successful results, including

4,000 people arrested.

Agents will remain in the city, he said, but the surge of thousands of agents will end.

Tori van Utt of Axios adds that more than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned after the

Department of Justice declined to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretty,

and support for Trump's handling of deportations cratered as Americans saw children tear-gassed

and citizens shot.

Acting Director of ICE Todd Lyons told the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday

that the agency is training agents adequately before they go into the field, and that, once

there, they are properly enforcing US immigration laws, and he added, we are only getting started.

But Lyons claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on Wednesday when the Federal

Aviation Administration, or FAA, abruptly closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas for what

it initially said would be 10 days.

Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical helicopters,

and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the closure of airspace after

9-11.

Confusion reigned since no one had notified even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000

people.

Shortly afterward, the FAA reopened the airspace.

Immediately said the problem was drones flown into the area by drug cartels, though

such drone flights are common.

Then the media reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new, anti-drone defense

system without sign-off from the FAA on danger to civilian planes.

Then it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth had permitted US customs and border

protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an anti-drone laser near Fort Bliss,

where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana.

Someone then used the laser without informing the FAA.

And then it turned out that the drones agents used the laser to shoot down were actually

party balloons.

But the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself concerning.

But that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso's airspace was in

the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is also a problem.

So two, of course, is that the administration's initial impulse was to lie about what happened.

In his testimony, Lions maintained that ICE is indeed prioritizing the removal of undocumented

immigrants with records of violent crime.

Enabling Republicans to claim that Democrats who want to rein ICE in are deliberately

endangering public safety.

Camillo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported this week that documents from DHS itself show

that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested in Trump's first year had

either convictions or charges for violent crimes, with fewer than 2% either charged with

or convicted of homicide or sexual assault.

Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively expanding

across the United States in the past months.

It is bought or leased new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the

country's largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas.

Feiger reports that DHS asked the General Services Administration, or GSA, which manages

government properties to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out

of national security concerns.

Douglas McMillan and Jonathan O'Connell of the Washington Post reported today that ICE

officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across the country.

ICE will retrofit 16 of them to become processing centers that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees

at a time before funneling them into 8 mega centers that can hold up to 10,000 detainees

each.

The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to imprison

non-citizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for asylum.

Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland, made an unannounced oversight visit

to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland yesterday.

He saw 60 men packed into a room shoulder to shoulder 24 hours a day with a single toilet

in the room and no shower facilities.

They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets.

Mike Hicksonbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a Russian family in the US seeking

asylum.

For four months, they have been incarcerated at the Dilly Immigration Processing Center

in Texas, where there is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or

worms.

In a statement, a spokesperson for DHS accused the media of peddling hoaxes about poor

conditions in detention centers.

But DHS has lied about so many things that no one should take their words seriously.

In January, when an ICE agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Cellis in Minneapolis, DHS claimed

that he had driven away from a targeted traffic stop, crashed into a parked car, and run.

When an ICE agent caught up with him, DHS said, the men had attacked the agent with a

snow shovel and a broom handle.

DHS said an agent had then fired on the men to defend his life.

The men escaped, but were later captured and charged with assault.

Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped the charges, saying newly discovered evidence

suggested the allegations were false.

Alhornas Lawyer explained, it is my understanding that the video surveillance evidence that

captured the incident was materially inconsistent with the federal agent's claims of what happened.

Last night, in a deep exposé of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Nome and her advisor

Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporter Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Torini

Party described a department in chaos.

Nome and Lewandowski, who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the

department together, are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to elevating

Nome to the presidency.

The reporters detailed the focus on image, the decimation of ice by firing or demoting

80% of the career field leadership that was in place when they arrived, the apparent

steering of contracts to allies and their excessive demands, including a luxury 737 max

jet with a private cabin in back for their travel around the country.

DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane, but is in the process of buying it.

DHS and the violence of federal agents have exacerbated rather than silencing opposition

to the Trump administration, causing a crisis for it as the American people increasingly

turn against it.

Trump is adamant that Republicans must win the 2026 elections, and so is calling for

new election laws, claiming that Democrats can win elections only through the illegal

votes of undocumented immigrants.

This ties DHS and American elections together.

Today, Nome told reporters in Arizona that Congress must pass the safeguard American voter

eligibility or save America measure to secure U.S. elections, lying that non-citizens

are voting for Democrats and thus enabling them to win elections.

This is an old saw Republicans have used since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed

the Motor Voter Act, and it has been repeatedly debunked.

Indeed, when reporters asked for an example of non-citizen voting, she said she couldn't

point to a case, but assumed it happened.

The bill would not only require voters to show either a passport or a birth certificate

with the name matching theirs in order to register, but would also require states to purge

their voting roles every month.

The measure passed the House Wednesday, but must overcome a filibuster to pass the Senate.

Jen Feifield of ProPublica and Zach Depart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported

today that DHS has been using an electronic tool called systematic alien verification for

entitlements or save previously used to check eligibility for public benefits to find non-citizen

voters in a database made up of confidential data from different government agencies.

Then information includes confidential data from the Social Security Administration accessed

by the Department of Government Efficiency.

Republican secretaries of state in 27 states have agreed to use save to check their voter

roles.

But Feifield and Depart report that the system makes persistent mistakes, frequently assessing

naturalized citizens as non-citizens.

The system automatically refers those individuals to DHS for possible criminal investigation.

And in certain states, individuals have had to prove their citizenship to be reinstated

as voters.

This is not ready for prime time.

County clerk Brianna Lennon of Boone County, Missouri told the reporters, and I'm not

going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.

And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands.

Although the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress and Congress alone that can

make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change the nation's

voting laws all by himself.

The account posted, the Democrats refuse to vote for voter ID or citizenship.

The reason is very simple, they want to continue to cheat in elections.

This was not what our founders desired.

I have searched the depths of legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject

and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future.

There will be voter ID for the midterm elections, whether approved by Congress or not.

Also, the people of our country are insisting on citizenship and no mail-in ballots with

exceptions for military, disability, illness or travel.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.

Today, ICE protesters carried a giant U.S. Constitution through the streets of Minneapolis,

demanding that federal agents honor the rights the framers established with that foundational

document.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Data Massachusetts, recorded with music composed