Here’s a question worth sitting with this week. DHS funding runs out Friday. Both parties are making demands. Neither is talking about why the system is broken in the first place. That’s not an accident. It’s a pattern that goes back thirty years and implicates everyone who had the power to fix it and chose not to. Today we’re looking at who actually broke immigration and why nobody wants to own it.

The Department of Homeland Security runs out of funding on February 13. Both parties are treating it like a crisis. Neither is treating it like an opportunity to actually fix anything.

Democrats in Congress released a list of ten demands before they’ll approve full-year DHS funding. Body cameras. Visible identification for agents. Judicial warrants instead of administrative ones. A ban on masks during enforcement operations. And the removal of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Some of those demands sound reasonable on the surface. Others are clearly designed to make enforcement operationally impossible. The demand to remove a cabinet secretary as a condition for funding a federal agency isn’t oversight. It’s political leverage disguised as principle.

Republicans are defending the enforcement mission and pushing back on most of the demands. Speaker Johnson called the judicial warrant requirement “a road we cannot or should not go down.” Some Republicans have signaled openness to body cameras and training reforms. But the GOP counter-demand to end sanctuary city policies tells you this isn’t really a negotiation about standards. It’s a negotiation about power.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, the real consequences are playing out in American neighborhoods. Operation Metro Surge deployed over 2,000 federal agents to a single city. Two American citizens were shot and killed by federal agents in separate incidents. The chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, compiled an appendix documenting 96 court orders that ICE violated in 74 cases in January alone, and said the actual number was almost certainly higher. Worth noting that Schiltz isn’t some liberal activist. He clerked for Antonin Scalia and was appointed by George W. Bush. When a judge with those credentials says there’s a rule of law problem, it’s worth taking seriously.

But here’s the other side of that picture. Over 400 habeas corpus petitions were filed in Minnesota in a single month. That volume isn’t organic. That’s a coordinated legal strategy designed to overwhelm the courts and slow enforcement to a crawl. The legal system is being weaponized too, just from the other direction.

So the obvious question isn’t who’s right. It’s how did we get to a place where enforcing immigration law requires a military-scale operation in an American city, and where the courts and Congress are more interested in fighting each other than fixing what’s broken? That answer didn’t start this year. It started decades ago.

President Clinton ran on being tough on immigration. And he was. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded deportation authority, added border agents, and created the framework for expedited removal. Clinton deported hundreds of thousands of people. Democrats were fine with it. Nobody called it unconstitutional.

President Bush tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. It failed. Not because Democrats blocked it but because his own party killed it. Republicans who wanted cheap labor for agriculture and construction had no interest in fixing a system that kept workers undocumented and powerless. The broken system served their donors just fine.

President Obama became the “Deporter in Chief.” His administration carried out more than 3 million removals during his time in office. He built the detention facilities that later became controversial under Trump. Democrats didn’t protest. Enforcement was acceptable when their president was doing it.

President Trump shifted enforcement dramatically, building border walls and implementing policies like family separation that drew intense opposition. But the underlying legal machinery he used was mostly the same framework Clinton and Obama relied on. The tools weren’t new. The political will to oppose them was.

President Biden reversed course again, scaling back enforcement and creating new gray areas through executive action. Asylum backlogs grew. Court systems fell further behind. The legal framework got more tangled. And the actual structural problems that had been accumulating for thirty years remained untouched.

Notice what didn’t happen during any of those administrations. Nobody rebuilt the immigration court system. Nobody modernized the legal pathways. Nobody reconciled the gap between the law on the books and the resources available to enforce it. Every president used executive power to adjust enforcement up or down based on political priorities. None of them did the hard legislative work of fixing the system itself.

That’s not an accident. That’s a choice made by both parties over three decades because a broken system was more useful than a functional one. Democrats got a growing voter base they could champion. Republicans got cheap labor their donors demanded. And the American people got a system that now requires federal agents to improvise their way through enforcement using outdated laws and administrative gray areas.

This is where it gets uncomfortable for everyone. The gray areas federal agents are operating in right now exist because Congress refused to do its job. Administrative warrants instead of judicial ones. Agents wearing masks during operations. Enforcement actions that blur the line between targeted and indiscriminate. These aren’t signs of a rogue agency. They’re symptoms of a system that was never designed for what we’re asking it to do in 2026.

That doesn’t excuse everything happening in Minneapolis. Two American citizens are dead. Court orders were violated, and not by a small margin. Communities were disrupted in ways that go beyond what enforcement should look like in a constitutional republic. Those things matter, and they should matter to anyone who believes in limited government and the rule of law.

But the politicians now demanding accountability for enforcement are the same ones who spent decades avoiding accountability for the system they let collapse. Democrats who celebrated deportations under Clinton and Obama don’t get to rewrite history and pretend enforcement itself is the problem. Republicans who blocked reform because it served business interests don’t get to pretend the system works fine and just needs more funding.

And judges who said nothing while administrations of both parties stretched executive authority for thirty years don’t get to suddenly discover the rule of law only when enforcement targets populations they’re sympathetic to. The courts are part of this broken picture too.

The principle here is simple. Self-governance requires honesty. You can’t spend thirty years making politically convenient choices that break a system and then act surprised when it operates in gray areas. You don’t get to point fingers at the symptoms while ignoring the disease you helped spread.

I want to hear from you.

Here's this week's question: What would it take for Congress to actually rebuild the immigration system instead of just fighting about it every funding cycle?

Hit reply and tell me what you think. I read every response, and the best insights may be featured in next week's issue.

Immigration didn’t break last month in Minneapolis. It broke over thirty years of political convenience from both parties who found a broken system more useful than a functioning one. Democrats got a cause. Republicans got cheap labor. And Americans got a system that now requires military-scale operations in their neighborhoods because nobody did the unglamorous work of rebuilding it.

That’s the standard worth holding. Not which party is winning this week’s funding fight but whether anyone in Washington is willing to do the hard work that outlasts a news cycle. Principles endure longer than political convenience. They’re supposed to.

Watch whether this funding deadline produces actual reform or just another extension. The pattern for thirty years has been the same: both parties negotiate just enough to avoid blame and not enough to fix anything. The question worth monitoring is whether that pattern holds or whether someone finally breaks from it.

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Jim Banks
Founder, Between the Lines

Between the Lines is a weekly newsletter for grounded patriots who need principled clarity on important issues without outrage or noise.

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