Tipsheet

All It Took for Democrats to Cave on DHS Funding Was Four Terrorist Attacks

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  March 13, 2026 11:15 AM

Two days ago, Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat, said his party was "serene" amid the current government shutdown. That was despite TSA agents not getting paid and hours-long lines at airports that made travel hell for Americans. Democrats did all that because they want to defund the Department of Homeland Security and abolish ICE so they can put illegal aliens — including violent criminals — ahead of the safety and security of Americans.

It wasn't the first time Democrats used Americans' suffering for political gain, of course. During the shutdown last fall, multiple Democrats said they planned to use the pain caused by the Schumer Shutdown as leverage to get their way. It shows us all exactly how Democrats feel about us.

But that was before the two terrorist attacks that took place yesterday. In Virginia, Mohamed Jalloh opened fire at Old Dominion University, killing Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, a professor and decorated veteran, and wounding two others in the school's ROTC program. Those ROTC cadets ended up subduing Jalloh and ending his life protecting one another. It turns out Jalloh, a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone, was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to 11 years in prison for providing support to the terror group ISIL, including traveling overseas several times to join them. Jalloh was released in 2024 for some reason and wasn't immediately denaturalized and deported.

Shortly after that terror attack, another Islamic terrorist named Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a Lebanese national who lived in Dearborn, Michigan, drove his car into Temple Israel Synagogue and school in West Bloomfield, a suburb of Detroit. Ghazali was confronted by armed security and killed. The vehicle also caught fire, burning Ghazali. One security guard was injured, but no students or staff were hurt as none were present on campus. Like Jalloh, Ghazali was a naturalized citizen.

Those two attacks were the third and fourth terror attacks on American soil in less than two weeks. On March 1, Ndiaga Diagne, a 53-year-old naturalized citizen from Senegal (noticing a pattern here?) opened fire at a bar in Austin, Texas, killing two and wounding several others. Diagne was wearing an Iranian flag t-shirt underneath a hoodie that had "Property of Allah" printed on the front. Last weekend, Ibrahim Kayumi and Emir Balat threw a homemade IED into a crowd of anti-Islam protesters in New York City, hoping to kill more people than the Boston Marathon terrorists did in 2013. That device, thankfully, didn't detonate.

Despite these terror attacks, and just minutes after Ghazali tried to kill Jewish children, both of Michigan's Democrat Senators — Elissa Slotkin and Gary Peters — voted down a bill that would have funded the Department of Homeland Security.

Democrats are keeping DHS shut down because, as we mentioned, they want to defund the agency and abolish ICE so illegal immigrants and terrorists like Jalloh and Ghazali can enter our country, vote in our elections, and keep Democrats in power.

But allowing terrorist attacks to happen on American soil doesn't sit well with voters, which is why Elissa Slotkin is now caving on funding DHS. The admission came during a press conference about the Temple Israel terror attack.

"A ton of DHS folks, CBP, so they are on the call and they are doing their jobs. Certainly, we need to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and we need, in my view, to cut away all the conversation on ICE, which is its own conversation, from all the core missions of the Department of Homeland Security," Slotkin said.

Guy Benson slammed Slotkin on Fox News over it.

"ICE is already funded for the next three years, so that conversation should have been stripped away already. For her to say that certainly we need to fund Homeland Security, I agree. But I'm not the one who voted to keep it closed yesterday. Which is what she did," Benson said. "There was a vote on this yesterday, which finished, by the way, after the attack in Michigan, in her state. She reacted on social media to that terrorist attack in her state before the vote ended. That kept the Democrat filibuster alive, meaning that the DHS department remains closed. She made that choice to vote to maintain the shuttering, the temporary closing, of our Homeland Security agency."

"And then she comes on the cameras today and says, 'Oh well, certainly we need to fund it.' She had the chance to do so yesterday and she chose not to," Benson continued. "This was after by the way, there are 47 Democrats in the Senate, 46 of them voted to maintain their filibuster to keep DHS closed. This is after four apparent jihadist attacks on the homeland in the last two weeks. Four homeland attacks in two weeks, and nearly every single Democrat in the Senate voted to keep Homeland Security closed. It's astonishing."

Yes, it is astonishing. Democrats have made it very clear they will put their pro-illegal immigration agenda before the safety and security of Americans, and now at least three people are dead and more wounded at the hands of jihadists who carried out four attacks in the last two weeks. Remember this in the midterms, and realize what Democrats can and will do if they regain power. They're not hiding it, after all.