For 41 days, Senate Republicans refused to entertain any bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security that did not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. On Friday, in the dead of night, they caved and passed a bill that did exactly that, ending a shutdown that—because the Transportation Security Administration, like ICE and CBP, is part of DHS—had brought chaos and historic wait times to U.S. airports. That bill will now move to the House of Representatives, where it will need significant Democratic support to pass, while ICE and CBP funding will be kicked to the budget reconciliation process. It was a deal that Democrats had been offering for weeks; on Friday morning, the Republicans took it without receiving anything in return. Is this what winning looks like? It certainly doesn’t feel like winning. The Democrats had embarked on the shutdown in an effort to push several ICE reforms, including a ban on face coverings, requiring judicial warrants for agents to enter private property, and stricter use-of-force standards and oversight. They did not gain any of them and, having helped end a painful shutdown, no longer have anything that could even charitably be described as “leverage.” ICE reform is all but dead, and the agency is funded until 2028, thanks to last year’s reconciliation bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which nearly tripled ICE’s budget.Still, this is a win. In context, it is actually a pretty big one, given that Democrats have no real power in Washington. But it also raises a more vexing question: Where do they go from here? The Republicans thought they had the Democrats on the ropes—that they could leverage the airport chaos into victory. Surely the Democrats, desperate not to be blamed for hours-long lines and missed flights, would do what they always do when push comes to shove: cave. Instead, Republicans were the ones who gave in. And, though it comes with considerable caveats—namely the tens of billions already earmarked for immigration enforcement, and potentially more to come through reconciliation—the fact that ICE and CBP aren’t receiving additional funding right now does matter. Every additional dollar that went to those agencies would have helped fund the massive deportation machine this administration is overseeing. That outcome looks better when you consider that Democrats had minimal leverage. They don’t control either chamber of Congress, which means that they need Republican votes to pass any piece of legislation—and Republicans were resistant to almost all reform, other than requiring agents to have body cameras and visible identification and a few other minor items. But conversely, Senate Republicans, with the exception of the reconciliation process, need a handful of Democratic votes to pass legislation—including spending bills to fund government agencies. That gave Democrats something they could use: Either agree to ICE and CBP reforms, they told Republicans, or we won’t vote to fund DHS. The Republicans refused, and the department shut down.That was February 14. And for a while, there were no apparent effects, so the shutdown continued amid half-hearted negotiations between the two parties. But then TSA employees started missing paychecks and stopped showing up for work, and Republicans and Democrats started getting serious about resolving the fight. When they couldn’t agree on reforms, they settled on the off-ramp of funding all of DHS except ICE and CBP—and by “they” I mean the five senators, two of them Democrats, who passed the measure in a voice vote in a near-empty chamber in the middle of the night.The idea that continuing that shutdown indefinitely could bring the GOP to heel was always farcical, as was the idea that the political price of that approach would be negligible because the public would blame Trump for its chaos more. The Democrats simply never had much to work with. The bill that passed early Friday is an off-ramp that they designed. Whether House Republicans agree to take it is another matter altogether. The bomb throwers in the House Freedom Caucus have already slammed the Senate bill and demanded House Speaker Mike Johnson put forth a 60-day continuing resolution that funds all of DHS, including ICE and CBP—a nonstarter in the Senate. Johnson doesn’t have the power to quash a revolt from his right flank, especially one that lines up with the president’s priorities, so he is dutifully following their lead, per Axios. Given the upcoming congressional recess, there’s a decent possibility that the shutdown will continue indefinitely. If it does, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans will shoulder even more blame for it than they do now. Still, it’s a deal that suggests that Democrats are still paying for mistakes they made at the start of Trump’s second term.