Senators return to Washington Monday with no formal negotiations underway on a Department of Homeland Security funding deal — and a Feb. 13 deadline that now looks almost impossible to meet. As of Saturday evening, talks hadn't even started.

The impasse centers on a familiar dynamic: Democrats are using must-pass funding legislation to extract concessions on immigration enforcement, while Republicans say the minority party has shown no serious interest in actually reaching a deal.

Asked about the chances of a deal, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) offered a characteristically blunt assessment: "About a minus squillion."

A Wish List That Keeps Growing

As reported by The Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sent Republican leaders a letter last Wednesday night containing a 10-item wish list — a document that drew immediate scorn from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), who noted the list had ballooned from three items to ten.

"It's totally unrealistic. It just shows you they're not serious."

Among the Democratic demands: requirements that immigration agents obtain judicial warrants before making arrests, and that ICE and CBP agents unmask while conducting immigration operations. Democrats sent the legislative text of the wish list to Republicans on Saturday.

A senior GOP aide familiar with the situation cut to the procedural heart of the problem:

"This is an appropriations bill, not an authorizing bill. There should be a funding nexus, and most of their demands have no funding nexus. That's an issue here."

The aide noted that Republicans had already secured major concessions in an earlier four-corners agreement, which included added funding for body cameras, de-escalation initiatives, and the DHS inspector general. They emphasized that these terms had already been settled and reflected a balanced compromise.

So the Democrats pocketed the compromises and came back asking for more. That's not negotiation. That's an escalation ladder.

Democrats Can't Decide Who to Negotiate With

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) claimed Democrats are ready to talk but can't figure out who's on the other side of the table:

"There's a lot of mixed signals coming from the Senate Republicans. … We sent them a proposal. We haven't seen anything back from them. It seems like they don't know who they want us to talk to right now."

That framing is difficult to square with Thune's account. He told reporters Thursday that Republicans had reached out to Schumer and top Democrats multiple times and were met with "crickets."

Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), whom Thune put in charge of negotiations for the Republican conference, said she had no planned discussions with Democrats over the weekend. Her frustration was pointed:

"It just seems like if you actually want an outcome here, that you'd want a dialogue with Republicans. Continuing to tweet and press conference and tweet and not have a conversation — it doesn't seem like that's an actual pathway forward."

That line captures the entire Democratic strategy in miniature. The performance of outrage — the tweets, the press conferences, the breathless letters — substitutes for the unglamorous work of actually sitting down and hashing out a deal. It's governance as content creation.

The Real Play: Defund Immigration Enforcement

The most revealing element of the Democratic position isn't what they're demanding — it's what they want to exclude. Multiple top Democrats, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), called for a full-year DHS bill that funds FEMA, TSA, the Coast Guard, and other priorities while carving out immigration enforcement entirely. The idea is to isolate ICE for separate negotiation — or, more likely, separate strangulation.

Thune translated the proposal plainly:

"So, in other words, defund law enforcement. That's kind of a large portion of what DHS is. I don't know how you do that."

Kennedy connected the dots further, arguing that the impasse isn't really about policy specifics at all:

"This is not about reforming DHS. This is about the Karen wing of the Democratic Party that wants to defund ICE, just like they wanted to defund the police."

He took his criticism further, suggesting that Democratic leadership wouldn’t be able to secure enough votes even if Republicans gave in on every issue. According to him, many Democrats would still reject the bill out of fear of backlash from the "Karen wing" of their party.

If Kennedy is right — and the progressive base's pressure campaign suggests he is — then the 10-item wish list was never meant to be a negotiating position. It was designed to fail, giving Democrats a talking point about Republican intransigence while avoiding a vote that would force them to fund immigration enforcement.

The Clock and the Calculus

The math is punishing. The Senate is scheduled to leave for recess Thursday, with dozens of members set to fly out that night for the Munich Security Conference. That gives lawmakers roughly four working days to begin, conduct, and conclude negotiations that haven't yet started on a bill where the two sides aren't even in the same zip code on substance.

Thune has indicated the recess may be scrapped if a shutdown looms, which raises the possibility of yet another short-term continuing resolution to keep DHS funded while talks drag on. Murphy pushed back on that idea, saying an extension would only prolong the current problems and isn't what the public supports.

A curious formulation from a senator whose party is working overtime to hamstring immigration enforcement. The "lawlessness" Murphy references isn't the border — it's the enforcement itself. That inversion tells you everything about where Democrats have landed on this issue.

The Bigger Picture

Republicans enter this standoff with a structural advantage. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed last summer, ensured border operations would be covered for the foreseeable future. The leverage Democrats once held through the appropriations process has diminished. What remains is the ability to delay, obstruct, and hope that the political pressure of a DHS shutdown falls on Republicans.

But the politics have shifted. Democrats are demanding that federal agents obtain judicial warrants and show their faces during enforcement operations — demands born not from policy analysis but from the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis. The base wants confrontation, not compromise. Democratic leaders are caught between a progressive movement that views ICE as an occupying force and a public that broadly supports immigration enforcement.

Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.) gave a restrained response when asked about the state of negotiations, simply saying they’ve been extremely challenging.

Britt said the White House and Senate Republicans both want a pathway forward. The question is whether Democrats want one too — or whether the deadlock is the point. When your negotiating partner won't sit at the table, won't return calls, and keeps adding items to a wish list that has no funding nexus to the bill in question, the answer becomes obvious.

The deadline is Thursday. The talks haven't started. And the people who keep tweeting about urgency are the same ones who won't pick up the phone.