The Trump administration plans to keep paying law enforcement officers within the Department of Homeland Security while other federal workers go without paychecks due to the government shutdown, according to an internal DHS memo obtained by HuffPost.
The memo issued by the agency’s top human resources officer on Wednesday said the White House had directed DHS to continue “timely payment” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officers, U.S. Border Patrol agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, even though federal funding had lapsed.
Those personnel have been key to Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in cities around the country, and the decision to pay them amounts to special treatment for Trump’s favorite constituency within the federal bureaucracy.
The memo said paying ICE officers and Border Patrol agents despite the shutdown would be “in alignment with the Administration’s commitment to law enforcement officers.”
It did not spell out exactly where the money would be coming from or what the legal justification would be — only that DHS would “allocate available funding to ensure full and timely payments … for the duration of the shutdown.”
