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By Rebecca Shabad, Frank Thorp V, Alex Moe and Marianna Sotomayor
WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators said Monday night that they had reached an “agreement in principle” to fund border security and prevent another partial government shutdown on Saturday.
Senate and House appropriators from both parties who emerged from an evening meeting would not comment on the details of the deal because they said staff was still working on last-minute logistics. They also would not say when they would release the text of the bill they plan on proposing.
“We reached an agreement in principle between us all on the Homeland Security and the other six bills,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told reporters. “Our staffs are going to be working feverishly to be putting all the details together, and that’s all we can tell you now.”
The agreement came in a third round of talks on Capitol Hill Monday following a weekend of stalled negotiations, and came just ahead of a Make America Great Again rally that President Donald Trump was holding in El Paso, Texas on Monday night.
“We probably have some good news but who knows,” Trump told the crowd at the rally.
Top Democratic appropriators Rep. Nita Lowey of New York and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont met behind closed doors with their Republican counterparts, Rep. Kay Granger of Texas and Shelby.
Over the weekend, a new sticking point had emerged in the negotiations: not the border wall, but the number of detention beds for undocumented immigrants who enter the country.
“I’m hoping we can get off the dime later today or in the morning because time is ticking away,” Shelby, who led negotiations as part of the bipartisan, bicameral conference committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We got some problems with the Democrats dealing with ICE, that is detaining criminals that come into the U.S. and they want a cap on them. We don’t want a cap on that.”
“I think the next 24 hours are crucial,” Shelby added during the Sunday morning interview.
A senior Democratic aide told NBC News on Sunday that Senate Republicans would need to accept “limits” on Trump immigration policies in the form of a cap on the bed count: “A deal that includes new physical barriers must all include limits on the number of ICE detention beds. If Senate Republicans won’t compromise with us on both, we can’t reach a deal.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday called the Democrats’ demand a “poison pill” and said it would be a “total nonstarter with the White House.”
Speaking at his rally in El Paso Monday night, Trump said, “I will never sign a bill that forces the mass release of violent criminals into our country.”
“These are people, they kidnap people. These are people the Democrats want to come into our society. I don’t think so,” the president told a group of sheriffs at the White House earlier Monday. “I don’t know, maybe we’re in a different country than I know of.”
Democrats say they don’t want more detention beds because they think the more humane policy is to allow asylum-seekers and other immigrants without criminal records to be released while they await their immigration proceedings.
In a letter sent to negotiators during the last round of talks in January, the White House Office of Management and Budget requested $4.2 billion for 52,000 beds, $798 million more than current funding levels.
Democrats were proposing a cap of 16,500 detention beds.
“A cap on ICE detention beds will force the Trump administration to prioritize deportation for criminals and people who pose real security threats, not law-abiding immigrants who are contributing to our country,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee and a member of the conference committee, said in a statement Sunday.
A cap on detention beds, a House Democratic aide said Monday, would also rein in the Trump administration’s agenda on deportations.
White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who hosted several members of Congress at Camp David over the weekend, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the White House “absolutely cannot” rule out another government shutdown.
“Let’s say the hard-core left wing of the Democrat Party prevails in this negotiation and they put a bill on the president’s desk with, say, zero money for the wall, or $800 million, an absurdly low number. How does he sign that?” he said.
Republicans had started to discuss the idea of proposing a one-year continuing resolution that would keep funding at current levels, but it had not been clear that Democrats, who control the House, would accept that, or whether President Trump would sign it.
Trump tweeted Sunday that negotiations were going poorly. “The Border Committee Democrats are behaving, all of a sudden, irrationally. Not only are they unwilling to give dollars for the obviously needed Wall (they overrode recommendations of Border Patrol experts), but they don’t even want to take muderers [sic] into custody! What’s going on?”
Garrett Haake and Heidi Przybyla contributed.