Scalise accuses Democrats of reviving 'defund the police' push with DHS funding gambit

EXCLUSIVE: A senior House GOP leader is accusing Democrats of reviving their controversial push to "defund the police" with their latest bid to circumvent funding for law enforcement under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., called the progressive slogan "one of the dumbest ideas in the history of politics" in an interview with Fox News Digital.

"The American people lambasted them, and they moved on for a little while, but they came back to it, and they're trying it again," Scalise said. "We're not going to let them do it. And by the way, we're at a heightened level of threat — this is when everybody should be coming together and making sure that the Department of Homeland Security has all the tools they need to keep Americans safe."

Democratic leaders announced on Wednesday that they would move to force a vote on legislation to fund all of DHS except for agencies that aid in President Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration. It comes as the ongoing partial government shutdown, only affecting DHS, has gone on for over a month with no end in sight.

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"If you look, they fund everything except the law enforcement side, which is defunding the police. So here they go again. Democrats, for some reason, just hate law enforcement," Scalise said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., announced Democrats are filing a discharge petition on a bill to fund all of DHS except immigration enforcement on Wednesday. A discharge petition is a mechanism to force a vote on legislation over the objections of House leadership, provided the measure in question has support from a majority of House lawmakers.

"We can fund [the Transportation Security Administration], fund the Coast Guard, fund our cybersecurity professionals or continue to allow ICE to brutalize and in some cases kill American citizens or to violently target law-abiding immigrant families," Jeffries told reporters.

It would need some GOP support to reach that threshold under current numbers. Scalise would not say whether he anticipated it getting that support, but he was skeptical that it would unite all House Democrats.

"Frankly, there should be Democrats that don't want to be a part of that, that don't wanna be associated with defunding the police again. They touched the stove and got burned a few years ago. Are they really gonna be stupid enough to make that same mistake again?" he said.

The infamous three-word slogan made headlines in 2020 amid nationwide racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.

Progressives across the country demanded that their governments withhold funding from police departments if they did not radically change their standards, while some on the far-left called to abolish law enforcement altogether.

But it quickly became unpopular with the majority of Americans, who were concerned it would lead to nationwide policies that led to more crime across towns and cities.

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., famously said the movement was "dead" in 2022 and said "defund the police" is "not the position of the Democratic Party."

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Democrats faced significant losses in the midterms that year, with Republicans winning back control of the House of Representatives.

But Republicans are arguing that Democratic leaders are mounting that push once more in their efforts to partially fund DHS.

Their proposal would mean that both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are both left unfunded, agencies that Republicans argue are responsible for law enforcement that’s critical to national security.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., pointed out during a Tuesday press conference that CBP is the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.

"Customs and Border Protection plays an irreplaceable role in our national security framework. This is not a game. Our CBP agents stand on the front lines. They protect our nation against transnational crime, drug and child trafficking, and terrorist threats before they reach our communities," Johnson said.

"The law enforcement agencies that are part of the Department of Homeland Security are what they're targeting. Democrats refuse to reopen TSA and FEMA and the Coast Guard and these other critical functions of government unless they can reopen our borders to illegal aliens."

Both ICE and CBP’s responsibilities extend beyond border security as well.

ICE is responsible for investigating transnational crimes, including terrorism, narcotics smuggling, and international gang activity. CBP also has its own counterterrorism responsibilities, along with its duties to facilitate lawful travel into the U.S. and combat transnational crime.