by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News March 23, 2026

President Donald Trump on Sunday said any agreement to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must include passage of the SAVE America Act.

“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’ ” the president wrote on Truth Social.

The SAVE America Act requires voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

The House and Senate are due to leave Washington, DC after this week for the Easter and Passover holidays. Trump called on Senate Republicans to override the 60-vote legislative filibuster and “stay in DC for Easter, if necessary.”

Negotiations are underway on Capitol Hill to try to hammer out an agreement to reopen DHS and prevent the shutdown from extending past the two-month mark. Little progress had been made before Trump’s Sunday comments.

“We’ll see if they can land something,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Politico on Sunday. “I think the clock’s ticking. If we’re going to get this done, we’ve got to get moving pretty quickly here.”

House Republican leadership plans to hold at least one more vote to reopen DHS this week, but they have made no plans to cut their break short to wait for any potential deal.

Trump said of the SAVE America Act in a post to Truth Social:

It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate, and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems (who are to blame for this mess!), a Five Billion Dollar cut in ICE funding, a deal which, even when disguised as something else, is unacceptable to me and the American people – UNLESS it includes their approval of Voter I.D., (with picture!), Citizenship to Vote, No Mail-In Voting (with exceptions), All Paper Ballots, No Men In Women’s Sports, and No Transgender MUTILIZATION of our precious children … In other words, lump everything together as one, and VOTE!!!

Trump on Monday began deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to roughly a dozen airports across America to assist Transportation Security Administration agents who have been working without pay since Democrats began their refusal to fund DHS on Feb. 14.

In a brief phone interview with NewsNation on Sunday afternoon, Trump said he was willing to keep ICE agents in America’s air travel hubs “for as long as it takes.”

“Now that I did this, the Democrats want to make a deal,” the president told correspondent Hannah Brandt. “And I don’t think any deal should be made on this until they approve SAVE America. OK? So, you have a scoop.”

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  Trump: No DHS deal without Save America Act, WorldTribune.com