Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine held a press conference at the Pentagon on Thursday. Secretary Hegesth said that today will be the ‘largest strike package yet’ in the operation in Iran, saying that the U.S. is winning ‘decisively.’ Caine and Hegseth stressed that the U.S. will continue to strike Iran's industrial base.
President Trump issued a sharp warning to Iran, after overnight strikes on a major natural gas site in Qatar. This comes as the president says Israel struck the South Pars Gas Field in Iran. President Trump saying the U.S. was not involved, but said that any further attacks on Qatar could trigger a strong U.S. response, and that no more attacks will be made by Israel on the facility.
Airport chaos continues as Congress fails to break the stalemate over DHS funding. Democrats now rejecting the latest proposal from the White House regarding immigration enforcement. Democrats are instead trying to get Republicans to settle for a partial funding deal, a plan that would fund certain parts of the DHS like FEMA, and TSA. This approach would likely prolong the shutdown for the other aspects of DHS and it’s a move that Republicans have said is off the table. -- 📺 Watch NTD News 24/7 on cable, broadcast, and streaming: https://www.ntd.com/watch
Airport chaos continues as Congress fails to break the stalemate over DHS funding.
Democrats now rejecting the latest proposal from the White House regarding immigration
enforcement. NTD's Melina Weisskopf reports. Melina, is there any movement on DHS funding
at the moment? Well Steph, the White House is strongly pushing for this, but it appears that
Democrats are keeping the door shut on making a breakthrough on this unless all of their demands
are met when it comes to changes to ICE policy. Earlier this week, Voters R. Tom Homan sent a
proposal over to Democrats in Congress. This proposal met several of Democrats' demands,
like expanding the use of body cameras for agents, limiting enforcement in sensitive locations,
greater oversight of detention facilities, and the enforcement of visible officer identification.
But Democrats say even this is not enough. Instead, they're pushing to get all of their
demands met before a breakthrough happens. They also want to require ICE to get judicial warrants
before they conduct immigration enforcement operations, and they also want to require
agents to remove their masks. Listen to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The key issues of warrants when you bust in someone's house, the key issue of
identity of police and no masks, they haven't budged on those.
Now, Steph, these are two issues that Republicans rejected from the outset because they say that
requiring judicial warrants would make immigration enforcement more difficult by bogging down the
process with bureaucracy. As for the issue of masks, Republicans say that these masks protect
agents and their families from potentially being targeted by people who oppose them and may want
to harm them. Democrats also sent a counterproposal over to the White House on Tuesday after they
So, is there a plan B to get this funding stalemate over with?
Well, not really, Steph. At the end of this, Democrats will still need to give the votes
to end this shutdown. One senator, Senator John Fetterman, one that has repeatedly voted with
Republicans on this issue, made a plea this week to his colleagues to do this sooner rather than
later. Here's Fetterman. It's not a blame thing for me. It's just more about what I happen to
believe is important in this circumstances, not shut it down. And now things get more and more
kinds of dangerous. I think it's, you know, and also TSA people.
And even as the White House sent out this proposal, Republicans on Capitol Hill are
also trying to work with Democrats, but they say Democrats won't even have a discussion with them.
Democrats instead are now trying to get Republicans to settle for a partial funding deal,
a plan that would only fund certain parts of the DHS, like FEMA, like the TSA.
But this approach would likely prolong the partial shutdown for other aspects of the DHS,
and it's a move that Republicans have simply said is off the table. Here's House Majority
Leader Steve Scalise. We don't fund agencies piecemeal. You fund the things you support,
and you don't fund the things you don't like. We have a Department of Homeland Security.
It was created in the wake of 9-11. Democrats are operating like it's September 10th.
Now, Seth, something else I should also note about the dynamics here is the fact that though
Democrats are saying they don't want to agree to fund the DHS because they don't want to fund
ICE in particular, the agency is actually still being funded currently through the
GOP's one big beautiful bill that was signed into law last summer. So Republicans are saying
this delay is not really serving a purpose other than a political show, Seth.
So it looks like there's still no end in sight on how long this partial shutdown will last.
Talk to us about the impact on airports and the TSA.
Right. So we know that around 50,000 TSA officers, we've heard repeatedly about this,
have been forced to work without pay. That's led to hundreds of TSA officers to quit their jobs,
and the workers calling out from their jobs is also a very common phenomenon. That's only
getting worse by the day. For example, more than 10% of TSA officers didn't show up for
work this past Sunday and Monday, which is actually the highest rate that's been seen
since the shutdown started. This has led to, of course, very long waits at airports, in some cases
up to three to four hours of a wait. That's an issue that the TSA administrator said is expected
to get worse. Here's the administrator. If Senate Democrats don't come back to the
table, we're going to continue to see these wait times continue to uptick. Philadelphia
had to collapse lanes because of cost. So the reality of the situation is this is going to get
worse before it gets better if we don't see any sort of action from Congress. He also warned that
if this issue isn't solved fast, small airports could actually be shut down entirely. Steph.
All right. Thanks so much for the update this morning.
NTD Congressional Correspondent Melina Wisecup.