President Trump fully backs Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem as Democrats call for her firing, sources told Fox Digital. (Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images)
Republicans have accused Democrats of holding DHS hostage as its funding deadline nears, while Democrats issued a series of 10 demands for reforms to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday, insisting they be added to the funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security.
As Democrats focus on forcing ICE reforms, a DHS funding lapse would ripple far beyond immigration enforcement, Noem told Fox Digital. ICE is about 11% of the department’s total budget and the other 89% would fall inside the blast radius.
The Department of Homeland Security is one of Washington’s largest departments, made up of 23 agencies whose work touches daily life — from airport screening and travel to disaster response — while also carrying out core homeland security and immigration enforcement missions.
Just a handful of agencies within the Department of Homeland Security include: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Secret Service, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, and the Federal Protective Service.
If DHS funding lapses, Americans will feel the impact quickly, Noem said, warning that Democrats’ focus on ICE would drag all 23 DHS agencies—and roughly 280,000 employees—into the fight.
She said FEMA’s role extends past disaster coordination — including continuity-of-government planning — while the Coast Guard’s operations would be strained if support staff were furloughed, potentially affecting maritime safety and commerce. Noem warned the funding lapse could trigger ripple effects for agencies like the Secret Service and the cyber-focused CISA, and said airport screening could be disrupted because TSA wouldn’t have other money to fall back on.
The Coast Guard Cutter Wire, a 65-foot icebreaking tug homeported in Saugerties, New York makes its way through an ice flow. (Mike Lutz/USGC via Getty Images)
Democrats have railed against the Trump administration for its crackdown on illegal immigrants, most notably in the last two months as federal agents converged on Minnesota to carry out arrests of violent illegal immigrants. Two Americans were fatally shot amid separate confrontations with federal law enforcement in January, heightening protests and clashes targeting ICE and Border Patrol as Democrats claimed the government had blood on its hands over the deaths.
Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is seen during an assumption of command ceremony at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (Luke Johnson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
NOEM SLAMS DEMS, BIDEN ADMINISTRATION FOR LACKING 'COMPASSION' AMID ANTI-ICE TENSIONS
Noem, who served in the U.S. Congress representing South Dakota for eight years before her tenure as the Mount Rushmore State’s governor, added that Democrats using the appropriations process to force policy changes was improper. She said if they want to change how the department operates, they should do it through stand-alone legislation and an open policy debate.
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"The appropriations process should be a funding and debate and budget process, which the House did. They did their appropriations bill and sent it to the Senate. Now the Democrats are trying to hijack that to do policy, and if they really want to have a debate and have policy and what the department is doing, the appropriate way to do that is through legislation, is to have the debate there," she said.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/noem-rips-dems-using-families-political-weapons-dhs-funding-fight