Top Senate Democrat says ‘House Republicans caved’ as deal to fund DHS moves forward – as it happened

Today’s developments:

• House Republicans announced that they will pass a bill, advanced by the Senate last week, to end the record-breaking partial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown after previously rejecting the measure.

• Democrats quickly celebrated the win with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer saying “House Republicans caved” after previously “[derailing] a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction”.

• Nasa’s lunar rocket successfully launched and the astronauts on the first crewed lunar rocket in more than 50 years received praise from across the US.

• Attorney general Pam Bondi’s job with the Trump administration is reportedly at risk. The president is said to be unhappy with Bondi’s performance as the head of the justice department and the controversy surrounding the Epstein files, according to a New York Times report.

• Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation on Wednesday to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and to begin a process that will eventually unenroll voters who have not provided citizenship documentation.

• Supreme court justices appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument to restrict birthright citizenship for hundreds of thousands of children born to undocumented immigrants of temporary foreign nationals. Trump himself attended the hearing, widely considered to be the first time a sitting president has attended arguments at the supreme court.

This blog is winding down shortly, but you can find more of the Guardian’s live coverage on the crisis in the Middle East and Donald Trump’s address to the nation here:

Attorney general Pam Bondi’s job with the Trump administration is reportedly at risk.

The president is said to be unhappy with Bondi’s performance as the head of the justice department and the controversy surrounding the Epstein files, according to a newly published article in the New York Times.

Unnamed sources told the newspaper that Donald Trump has not yet made a decision, but has suggested replacing Bondi with EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. The Times reported that Trump is also upset about her department’s failure in cases launched against his critics and opponents, such as James Comey and Letitia James.

Nasa’s lunar rocket is minutes away from launching. Meanwhile, the astronauts on the first crewed lunar rocket in more than 50 years are receiving praise from across the US.

“Artemis II lifting off today represents the very best of America—bold vision, cutting-edge technology, and the courage to push beyond boundaries. Proud of the men and women making it happen,” said Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.

“Proud moment for all Michiganders as @Astro_Christina, a Grand Rapids native and one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, launches on a 10-day journey to the moon. She’s also set to become the first woman to travel beyond low-Earth orbit toward the moon. You’re an inspiration,” Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin said on social media.

Astronaut Christina Koch also got a shoutout from North Carolina.

“North Carolina is incredibly proud of our own NC State alum, Koch, a trailblazer who is an inspiration to us all. Wishing the entire crew a safe and successful journey!,” Senator Thom Tillis said.

Follow the launch live here:

Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the Trump administration in a statement reacting to the announcement of the DHS funding bill.

The House Democratic leader described Republican policies as a disaster that have led to skyrocketing costs, the deaths of US citizens at the hands of ICE, a healthcare crisis and war.

“For the last 47 days, Donald Trump and Republicans have subjected the nation to chaos at airports, jeopardized our national security and kept the government closed to allow ICE to continue to brutalize the American people without consequence,” Jeffries said in a statement.

”It’s time to pay TSA agents, end the airport chaos and fully fund every part of the Department of Homeland Security that does not relate to Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine.”

In response to the news that Republicans agreed to pass the bill to fund DHS, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, said: “ House Republicans caved.”

“For days, Republican divisions derailed a bipartisan agreement, making American families pay the price for their dysfunction. Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered,” Schumer wrote in a statement on social media.

“We were clear from the start: fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and Border Patrol enforcement. We were united, held the line, and refused to let Republican chaos win.”

House Republicans announced today that they will pass a bill, advanced by the Senate last week, to end the record-breaking partial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown, which has lasted 47 days so far.

Last week, GOP in the lower chamber rejected the funding measureto reopen the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the US Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa). Notably, the bill withhold funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Instead, House Republicans passed a continuing resoltion to keep DHS running through 22 May.

In a joint statement Wednesday, speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority leader John Thune said that congressional Republicans will not attempt to push the stopgap bill – which Democrats say has no chance of clearing the 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.

Now, they will advance the legislation which hardline House Republicans previously rebuked. They will also seek to pass wider funding for the DHS, which will include funding for enforcement and removal operations, through reconciliation.

This maneuver, used to pass Donald Trump’s sweeping tax policy bill last year, only requires a simple majority in the Senate.

“It is now abundantly clear that Democrats place allegiance to their radical left-wing base above all else – including their own power of the purse – which means open borders and protecting criminal illegal aliens,” Johnson and Thune said. They noted that the future budget resolution will underwrite the DHS for three years, until Trump leaves office. Republican leadership said this will protect against “future attempts by the Democrats to defund those agencies”.

While Congress is on a scheduled recess at the moment, there are pro forma sessions on Thursday where lawmakers could take up and pass the funding bill that previously failed.

I just spoke with Amanda Frost, a professor of immigration law at the University of Virginia, who was watching the arguments at the court today.

She said that her “immediate reaction” is that the challengers, represented by Cecillia Wang, “will prevail”.

She added:

The justices asked all the right questions of both sides, and the solicitor general did not have the answers that they would have needed to rule for him.

Frost also underscored how the justices didn’t seem swayed by the administration’s policy-based arguments about the significance of birth tourism. As I reported earlier, D John Sauer conceded that “no one knows for sure” how significant a problem this issue is. The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration thinktank, said that there are between 20,000 to 26,000 births by women on tourist visas annually. This is less than one percent of all babies born in the US each year.

During today’s arguments, chief justice John Roberts even suggested that concerns about birth tourism have “no impact on the legal analysis”.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation on Wednesday to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and to begin a process that will eventually unenroll voters who have not provided citizenship documentation.

Florida is now the third state to pass proof-of-citizenship laws for voting this year, after South Dakota and Utah’s governors each signed proof of citizenship bills into law in March.

The changes come as Donald Trump’s signature restrictive voting bill, the Save America Act, languishes in the US Senate with little chance of passage. The president is left weighing his options about how to move forward with its provisions, which include documented proof of citizenship requirements to register and strict photo ID requirements to vote.

The most likely path forward will be to continue to encourage conservative states to enact the same voting restrictions.

The Florida law requires the Florida department of state to identify registered voters who may not be citizens and therefore ineligible, checking their registration against state and federal records to determine citizenship. A potentially ineligible voter will be contacted by the registrar and asked to provide documentation, and unenrolled if they do not do so.

The law also adds US passport cards to the list of the types of ID acceptable as voter ID, while removing retirement center IDs, public assistance IDs, neighborhood association IDs, and debit and credit cards as acceptable ID. The changes will take effect on 1 January 2027.

Read the full report here:

As we noted earlier, the lawyer for the challengers in today’s case is Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the ACLU. My colleague Ed Pilkington previously reported on how Wang’s personal journey, as a birthright citizen herself, influenced her approach to this moment.

Wang’s parents moved to the US from Taiwan in the late 1960s, beneficiaries of the civil rights era and the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act that finally ended racist quotas from Asia.

“I really feel a personal moral obligation to be a civil rights lawyer. In a real sense, that’s why I’m here,” she said.

Wang also has the benefit of experience with Trump’s modus operandi given the ACLU’s relentless stand against Trump’s constitutional excesses during his first presidency.

A star litigator, she was on the frontlines of many of the organization’s biggest victories. Overall, the ACLU filed almost 250 lawsuits against the first Trump administration and succeeded in stalling or scuppering many of his most egregious acts, especially those relating to immigration.

The organization helped put a stop to family separation at the Mexican border, prevented a citizenship question from being inserted into the 2020 census and forced the contentious Muslim travel ban to be rewritten twice before the supreme court finally approved it. The ACLU also pushed back relentlessly on Trump’s other policies, winning a major victory in 2020 prohibiting employment discrimination against gay and transgender workers. After the supreme court abolished the constitutional right to abortion – a decision that came during Joe Biden’s term but fulfilled a core Trump promise – the ACLU and its affiliates immediately filed lawsuits to protect reproductive rights in almost a dozen states.

Away from the supreme court, another big story today is the expected launch of the Artemis II moon mission.

Four astronauts are preparing to lift off on a 685,000-mile journey as hundreds of thousands of spectators will watch on the ground – and millions will follow it live around the globe.

You can watch and follow all the latest updates in our Artemis II blog here:

• Justices appeared skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument to restrict birthright citizenship for hundreds of thousands of children born to undocumented immigrants of temporary foreign nationals. The solicitor general, D John Sauer, argued that since noncitizens who are in the country temporarily aren’t “domiciled” they aren’t pledging “allegiance” to the US, and that subsequently invalidates their children’s claims to citizenship.

• However, both liberal and conservative blocs on the bench probed Sauer about his position since the language of “domicile” isn’t part of the citizenship clause of the fourteenth amendment. Chief justice John Roberts at one point referred to part of the government’s argument as “very quirky”, while justice Elena Kagan said the administration’s “revisionist theory” requires the court to change what “people have thought the rule was for more than a century”.

• Sauer also argued that unrestricted birthright citizenship has “spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism” and created “a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties” to the US. When Roberts asked the solicitor general how significant a problem this is, Sauer conceded that “no one knows for sure”, but cited a number of media reports about estimates. Overall, justices didn’t seem swayed by the administration’s policy-based arguments about the significance of birth tourism, and Roberts even suggested that concerns have “no impact on the legal analysis” in the case.

• Justices also grilled the lawyer for the challengers in today’s case, Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the ACLU, who said that Donald Trump’s executive order violates the fourteenth amendment, and would render swaths of American laws “senseless”. Wang noted that in US v Wong Kim Ark, a landmark decision on birthright citizenship, the court ruled that the fourteenth amendment “embodies the English common law rule” and that virtually everyone born on US soil is “subject to its jurisdiction and is a citizen”.

• Throughout their questions, Wang maintained that a foreign national’s so-called “allegiance” to another country should not affect their child’s citizenship. “The government’s rule, which really is looking at whether someone has a divided allegiance because they’re a citizen of another country, would exclude the children of all foreign nationals,” Wang said.

• The government argued the executive order should only apply “prospectively” – to babies yet to be born. If the court rules that the executive order can stand, it could leave around 250,000 children a year without citizenship. It would also mean that 3.5 million people annually would have to provide “acceptable evidence” of their own status or citizenship. Legal experts also say that the order opens up questions that potentially unwind everyone’s citizenship.

• Trump attended the hearing on Wednesday, widely considered to be the first time a sitting president has attended arguments at the supreme court. He sat through Sauer’s arguments before returning to the White House. In recent months, the president has slammed the highest court, saying he was “ashamed” of the justices who ruled against many of his sweeping tariffs.

The solicitor general, D John Sauer, issued a very brief rebuttal in which he reiterated the government’s argument that the ratification of the fourteenth amendment in 1868 was about overruling the “grave injustice” of the Dred Scott decision and making sure that “allegiance” was granted the children of newly freed slaves.

However, Sauer said, there is a “very strong, impressive consensus” in the years following that the children of “temporary sojourners” are not covered by the citizenship clause.

The arguments have now concluded.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the administration’s argument rests on a “different understanding of allegiance than what was in the English common law”, which explains that “you can have allegiance to two different sovereigns at the same time”.

Wang agrees with Jackson’s interpretation, and notes that if you want to look at the foreign national parents of those children born in the US, they owe “temporary allegiance”.

Jackson follows Wang’s argument: “So the babies get the permanent allegiance piece of this, and the parents get the local allegiance piece of this.”

Beija McCarter, an eighth grade US History teacher, and Noah Goldstein, a New Yorker who was also at last month’s trans rights rally, both arrived at Wednesday’s supreme court demonstration with clear eyes and little optimism about what the justices inside might decide.

“Checks and balances only works if there’s balance, and we’re not really having that,” said McCarter, who was born in Brazil to American military parents and had to formally apply for her own citizenship, giving her a small window into a process that is far harder for most others. “The rhetoric is that immigrants are taking our jobs, but they’re actually doing the jobs that Americans aren’t hoping to do – we should be nicer to our neighbor,” she said.

Goldstein was just as blunt about the court itself: “All nine of those justices in there know that birthright citizenship is codified in the fourteenth amendment, and I’m not confident that they are going to speak to what they know to be true.”

“You can only hope they’re going to take their jobs seriously,” McCarter chimed in.

But for both of them, the point of showing up went beyond the verdict.

“I always tell my students that they have a voice,” McCarter said, “and I can’t preach it if I’m not going to use it myself.”

There are some so-called “exceptions” to the birthright citizenship rule for children born in the US. These are outlined in Wong Kim Ark.

• Children born to foreign diplomats or ministers

• Children born on foreign public ships in US waters

• Children born to foreign enemies within the US during a hostile occupation

• Children of members of the Indian tribes, who owe direct allegiance to their tribe

A note that Congress ultimately guaranteed US citizenship for Native Americans in 1924.

In a back and forth with justice Sonia Sotomayor, Wang returns to the government’s argument about “allegiance”, and how it pertains to the citizenship of children born in the US to foreign nationals.

“The government’s rule, which really is looking at whether someone has a divided allegiance because they’re a citizen of another country, would exclude the children of all foreign nationals,” Wang said.

“I would say that the relevance of allegiance is the relevance, under the English common law rule that’s embodied in the fourteenth amendment – all persons born in the territory the sovereign owe natural allegiance.”