The House and Senate disbanded on Thursday to begin a Presidents’ Day recess without a deal on funding the Department of Homeland Security. That means the second partial government shutdown of this very young year is set to begin at midnight on Friday.

This shutdown will affect only DHS, whose spending authority is being held hostage as the two parties haggle over proposed “guardrails” to keep ICE and Border Control agents from killing people and terrorizing communities. The grand irony, of course, is that the shutdown will not affect immigration enforcement at all, which was given a separate, unimaginably large source of funding in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So it’s the non-immigration elements of DHS that will take the hit. And this shutdown could last a while because the two parties are miles apart on “ICE reforms” and nobody cares enough about the programs and personnel actually affected by the shutdown to avoid or end it. Such subagencies as FEMA, TSA, and the U.S. Coast Guard are hostages in somebody else’s war, and at this point no one loves them enough to pay a ransom for their release.

The earlier partial government shutdown that began on January 31 and ended on February 3 involved a much bigger batch of hostages: funding for giant departments like Defense, HHS, HUD, and Transportation. The deal that ended it basically released those hostages but kept DHS tied up. And that’s where it could remain for some time. As Punchbowl News reports, the two sides appear to be hardening their positions on ICE reform:

Chuck Schumer can’t give up much — if any — ground in the funding fight. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has taken an even tougher line …

It’s telling that Senate Democrats have been incredibly united behind their ICE demands, more so than the fall fight over health-care. Only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.), joined Republicans to support a failed procedural vote on a DHS funding bill Thursday …

The White House believes it’s past the worst of its political problems over ICE.

In fact, the main pressure the White House and GOP congressional leaders are feeling is from conservative hard-liners who relish a lengthy fight over immigration enforcement and would likely try to amend any DHS funding bill with poison pills like a crackdown on sanctuary cities or yet another “messaging” vote on the voter-suppressing SAVE Act.

Another thing making it likely the DHS shutdown won’t end soon is a general bipartisan feeling that the pain it will inflict is tolerable. FEMA has some leftover disaster funds (though administering them during a shutdown could be extremely difficult), TSA has some fee money it can access (though that will run out before long), and the Coast Guard has some sweet OBBBA money of its own. Still, some employees of these entities will be furloughed and others will work without pay, bringing back bad memories from the days when DOGE was battering federal employees and contractors with undisguised malice.

For the moment, the DHS shutdown is like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest that no one can hear other than the small critters crushed beneath it. No one cared enough to avoid it, and thus no one can be counted on to end it quickly.