The Department of Homeland Security is on track for a shutdown this weekend after Senate Democrats rejected a GOP-crafted funding bill that they said provided inadequate guardrails on federal immigration agents. Senators have already left town for the week, though some could return “on short notice if negotiators reach a deal,” The Hill reported Friday morning.
A possible deal fell apart Thursday after a four-hour hearing on Capitol Hill with the White House’s top immigration officials, including acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. Contradicting several top administration officials’ accounts—including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—Lyons testified that the two Americans killed by agents last month in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were not “to his knowledge” domestic terrorists. After his testimony, a deal to keep DHS open failed, 52-47, in a Senate vote that needed 60 votes to advance.
Lyons also misled lawmakers during the hearing, Kyle Clark of 9News Denver reported Thursday evening. Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that local law enforcement “made notifications” and tipped off the intended targets ahead of an immigration raid at an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. “So when tactical teams arrived, protesters were already there and the apartment complex was empty,” Lyons said.
However, “Those apartments were being cleared out weeks earlier” in January and well before ICE agents showed up in Aurora on Feb. 5, Clark reports. Just hours after Lyons testimony on Thursday, ICE deleted social media posts with the claim.
Lawyers for a U.S. citizen shot by a Border Patrol agent also accused administration officials of lying, in the case of Chicago-based school teacher Marimar Martinez. The Hill has more.
Additional reading: “A Pilot Fired Over Kristi Noem’s Missing Blanket and the Constant Chaos Inside DHS,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a lengthy feature on Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski.
The U.S. spent more than $1 million per person to deport 300 people to countries they had no connection to, before later flying them again to their home nations at additional taxpayer expense. That’s according to a report Thursday advocating closer bipartisan oversight of DHS operations, via Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats.
Those operations alone ran up a bill of more than $32 million to five different countries: Equatorial Guinea ($7.5 million), Rwanda ($7.5 million), El Salvador ($4.76 million), Eswatini ($5.1 million) and Palau ($7.5 million). “Much of the funds were provided as lump sum payments, often before any third country nationals arrived,” although “actual costs [are] likely far higher,” according to the report. Details (PDF) here.
There’s still more local resistance affecting DHS plans to buy warehouses to concentrate migrants. The latest development reported Thursday occurred south of Kansas City after port authority “commissioners said the idea of the site being used for something other than industrial jobs, including possible federal detention, conflicted with long-term plans for the industrial district,” Fox4 reports.
In case you missed it: GSA’s procurement chief is attending negotiations for Ukraine and Gaza, Natalie Alms of our sister site Nextgov reported last month. His name is Josh Gruenbaum, 40, and he’s the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. He has a background in private equity and investment banking, but he’s been spotted in meetings alongside Israeli and Ukrainian officials over the past few months, Alms reported five weeks ago.
Read more: Three Wall Street Journal reporters teamed up Thursday to fill in more of Gruenbaum’s story as an under-the-radar negotiator in the second Trump administration—including his role in rejected missile-acquisition talks, his work with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and how he was photographed shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin just last month.
Speaking of Kushner, “The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner,” the Journal reported Thursday updating an unusual case that has concerned lawmakers charged with oversight of the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. officials told the Journal “there was no corroborating evidence to support the allegations,” however, “they said that didn’t prove they lacked any merit.”
Notable: Kushner “is now running an investment fund, Affinity Partners, which has drawn billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies, and has pursued potential projects around the world,” the Journal reports. (It has also been under conflict-of-interest investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.) Meanwhile, “U.S. intelligence officials are treating the material in the complaint with the utmost secrecy, contending that disclosure of the underlying intelligence report at issue could severely damage national security.”
By the way: The U.S. just dropped to its lowest-ever rank in a global corruption index, CNN reported Tuesday.
There’s a new poll out reflecting voters’ views of top White House officials, published Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is on it, and 31% of Americans said they’ve never heard of him. Of those who are familiar with him, 41% view him unfavorably versus 26% with a favorable view. Read more, here.
Additional reading:
- “White House uses USAID funds for budget director Vought’s security, documents show”—specifically, $15 million, Reuters reports;
- “ICE conducted 37 investigations into officer misconduct in last year,” NPR reported from the acting ICE director’s congressional testimony Thursday;
- “Trump is in the unredacted Epstein files ‘more than a million times,’ [Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin] alleges,” Axios reported Tuesday;
- “Conservatives unload on GOP’s failures to carry out DOGE cost-cutting,” CNN reported Thursday;
- “US business, consumers bore 90 percent of Trump tariff costs,” The Hill reported Friday citing a study published this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York;
- “Alberta separatists step up efforts to leave Canada after meeting with Trump officials,” Reuters reported Thursday from Calgary;
- “Many Republicans disapprove of Trump on Greenland,” the Associated Press reported Friday;
- And “A year into Trump’s term, voters say Biden was better,” Axios reported Thursday.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2013, the cruiser Lake Erie intercepted a medium-range ballistic missile in the first live test of missile-tracking satellites.
Around the Defense Department
President Trump is visiting Fort Bragg, N.C., today to speak with troops who reportedly helped in the operation to abduct Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro last month. Afterward, he’s headed to his Florida resort for the weekend, The Hill reports.
U.S. troops have officially departed their remote outpost at al-Tanf, Syria, close to the border with Jordan, officials at Central Command said in a statement Thursday. Elsewhere in the country, U.S. forces are withdrawing as part of “a conditions-based drawdown from northeast,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute said Thursday. And Syria’s military chief spoke by phone with the top U.S. commander in the region, Maj. Gen. Kevin Lambert this week as well.
The U.S. drawdowns are the result of a new approach from Syria’s new leadership since former dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country in December 2024. The key U.S. partners in the region, Syrian Democratic Forces, are being increasingly incorporated into the new Syrian state, which is taking on a growing role in fighting ISIS militants, Lister explained. Since last spring, 13 ISIS plots have allegedly failed ISIS leaders have been killed amid 11 joint raids and “dozens of U.S. intel-directed Syrian op[eration]s,” he added.
“The ISIS threat in Syria has turned increasingly urban over the past year,” said Lister, “and if the SDF integration is achieved, it’ll likely become even more so.”
U.S. forces in the region also just finished transferring “more than 5,700 adult male ISIS fighters from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody” in an operation that took more than three weeks to complete, CENTCOM said in a statement Friday.
Forever wars, continued? America may be carrying out a covert air campaign against al-Qaeda in Yemen, argued David Sterman, deputy director of the Future Security program at New America, writing Thursday in Just Security.
The most recent suspected strike appears to have occurred on Jan. 29, near the border with Oman. “And if this clandestine campaign is ongoing, then the lack of transparency greatly complicates efforts to ensure accountability for errors and civilian casualties. It also exacerbates the risk of further embroiling the United States in an endless war with no clear strategy,” Sterman warns.
Also from the region: The Indian Navy just took command of a maritime training task force based in Bahrain. It’s known as Combined Task Force 154, and it changed hands this week from the Italians to the Indians, officials said in a statement Wednesday. Twenty-two different nations are represented in the task force, which was established almost three years ago. Read more from the Indian Defense Ministry, here.
Back in the states, another Osprey was forced to make an emergency landing, this time in Hawaii, as the military rushes to fix enduring mechanical problems with the troubled aircraft, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported Thursday.
The latest incident happened on Feb. 3, when an MV-22B with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing landed in the Tactical Flight Training Area on Oahu “after experiencing an in-flight malfunction” with a gearbox failure. None of the crew was injured but the aircraft will “require maintenance actions and repairs” before returning to its home station, according to an emailed statement from the aviation wing.
Since 2022, four V-22 crashes have killed a total of 20 service members. Investigations blamed failures within the Osprey’s proprotor gearbox and sudden surges in power after a clutch slip, known as a hard clutch engagement. After the crashes, the Pentagon imposed range and other limits on V-22 flights. In December, the Government Accountability Office and NAVAIR separately issued reports that said the V-22 Joint Program Office failed to adequately assess and address mounting safety risks, even as service members died.
Only one other aircraft type, the F-35, had more than the V-22’s 28, Novelly reports. Continue reading, here.
Deliver what we ask for on time—that’s the terse message two maritime service chiefs are sending to industry, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday from the WEST 2026 conference in San Diego.
CNO: “Deliver it on time. That’s really what I need. I don’t know how to sugarcoat that. It’s impossible to sugarcoat that. I need my stuff on time,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, told attendees Wednesday.
Commandant: “If it’s going to be delayed, well, that’s a you problem. That’s not a me problem, because I paid for something and I expect to get it,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said. Keeping costs down without sacrificing quality or on-time delivery is a longstanding conundrum for military procurement, Williams reports. But while there’s general reticence towards higher costs, especially for large platforms like ships, it’s a reality the Navy must accept, Smith said. Read on, here.
US, NATO are practicing to take out 1,500 ground targets a day, plus 600 to 1,200 ballistic missiles, the commander of the Army’s Germany-based 56th Multi-Domain Command told reporters. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.
Additional reading:
