By Siobhan Hughes

Sen. Tina Smith (D., Minn.), who has been in her state responding to the aftermath of the shooting of a Minnesota man by a U.S. Border Patrol agent, is joining the list of Democrats who want restrictions on federal agents in exchange for providing votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans have called on Democrats to pass a $1.3 trillion package in order to avoid a partial government shutdown this weekend, but Democrats want to split off the portion that deals with the Department of Homeland Security so that they can impose changes like requiring agents to wear body cameras and identification.

"Republicans have a decision to make," she said in an interview. "They can avoid a shutdown on all five of those other parts of the federal government, and we can negotiate quickly and in good faith to come up with some commonsense guardrails to prevent kind of the worst of the abuses that we've been seeing."

Her list of changes overlaps with one identified by Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), who leads the panel that oversees DHS funding. Besides body cameras and identification, she wants to require federal agents to obtain a warrant signed by a judge before forcibly entering the homes of people they hope to arrest. The Trump administration has asserted sweeping new powers to act without such warrants after lawyers at ICE and its parent, DHS, crafted a new policy deeming that an administrative warrant showing the government has probable cause to believe a person is in the country illegally serves as enough of a basis to force entry.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 26, 2026 21:51 ET (02:51 GMT)

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