NPR woefully put it:
ICE and Border Patrol will be funded without the changes Democrats were demanding, including requiring judicial warrants to enter homes and prohibiting officers from wearing masks. The package also lacks reforms with bipartisan support, such as requiring officers to wear body cameras.
Not only is this standoff ending without Democrats achieving the reforms they pressed for, the agencies will be insulated from additional pressure through the appropriations process for three years.
Meanwhile, despite coordinated efforts of party officials, NGOs, the media, and rich backers, the often-violent campaign to disrupt deportations has completely failed.
Average weekly deportation numbers this fiscal year have been consistently higher than they were in 2025.
In the first six months of this fiscal year, ICE carried out 234,236 removals. That compares with 134,500 in the first six months of the previous fiscal year, according to Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University professor who has been tracking deportation data.
Average weekly deportations this April were significantly higher than in January.
Meanwhile, the number of people in ICE detention, while down from a January peak, was still higher in April than it was last September.
Now we come to the cherry on top.
While Democrats were spending all their political capital over the past year and a half fighting deportations, construction on the border wall has continued apace. This week, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said that the wall will be completed next year, with only a few gaps where it makes no sense to construct it.
This is the project, remember, that Democrats tried desperately to stop in Trump’s first term, including engineering what at the time was the longest government shutdown in history. Joe Biden stopped all border work and then tried to dump unused materials at fire-sale prices.
This time around, Trump secured $46 billion in construction funding in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the wall will include electronic surveillance and other tech that will be in place by summer 2028.
Even the attempt to block wall construction in Big Bend National Park failed. As the Texas Tribune notes, “Local residents, ranchers and environmentalists in the Big Bend area and across the state have expressed fierce opposition.” Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar tried and failed to attach language to the funding bill to prevent construction money from being used inside the park.
That is a win, by the way, that will long outlast Trump, since the wall will severely handicap future attempts by Democrats to throw open the Southern border.
What’s truly amazing about all this is how little the Democratic Party has suffered for this string of embarrassing flops.
Nobody’s calling for its leaders to step down for this disaster, or even defend themselves for their failure to get anything. No one is asking them to apologize to all the people whose lives they disrupted by the shutdowns.
It’s almost as if the Democrats never cared if they won or lost on this issue. Which would mean that their actions have been about something else – something like, say, stoking fear, anxiety, division, and hostility throughout the nation for their own political gain?
Either way, it’s been a breathtaking display of political recklessness.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I & I Editorial Board
The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.
