Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, conceded Sunday that the Biden administration botched immigration enforcement.

Appearing on Fox News's "Fox News Sunday," the Washington Democrat told host Shannon Bream what conservatives have argued for years.

"The Biden administration did not do immigration enforcement the way it should have. We should have had the border more secure than it was."

That admission landed in the middle of a partial government shutdown over ICE funding and tactics, with Democrats and Republicans locked in a standoff that has left TSA staffing thin and airports feeling the squeeze.

Smith's concession is notable not because it's news to anyone who watched the southern border deteriorate for four years, but because Democrats spent most of that time calling any criticism of Biden's border posture xenophobic. Now, with the political winds blowing differently, even a senior House Democrat finds it convenient to acknowledge reality.

The Shutdown Standoff

According to The Hill, the Senate approved a funding package over the weekend for agencies housed under the Department of Homeland Security, but it excluded full DHS funding. House Republicans rejected the bill and countered with an eight-week funding package that would fully fund the department.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer dismissed the House Republican proposal as "dead on arrival."

For weeks, Democrats have refused to fund DHS while holding firm to a set of demands:

• Requiring ICE agents to use judicial warrants
• Mandating body-worn cameras
• Forcing agents to remove face coverings

Those demands deserve scrutiny. Democrats are not asking for modest procedural guardrails. They are attempting to restructure how immigration enforcement operates at the operational level, using a funding bill as leverage. Judicial warrants for immigration enforcement would effectively give federal judges veto power over routine ICE operations. Body cameras sound reasonable in a vacuum, but the demand arrives packaged with the face-covering ban, which reveals the real goal: making individual ICE agents identifiable and, inevitably, targetable.

President Trump and other Republicans have argued that masks prevent agents from being doxed. Given the climate of harassment directed at federal law enforcement officers involved in immigration work, that concern is not hypothetical. It is operational security.

Smith Tries to Split the Difference

Smith attempted to position himself between what he called the "radical-left policy" of open borders and current enforcement practices. He told Bream: "But there's plenty of room between that policy, between the radical-left policy you keep talking about, you know, open borders and all that. And having, you know, masked unidentified ICE agents show up. No probable cause."

The framing is instructive. Smith wants credit for acknowledging Biden's failure while simultaneously advancing restrictions on the enforcement mechanisms designed to fix it. He admits the border should have been more secure, then objects to the tools being used to make it more secure. That is not a middle ground. It is a rhetorical two-step: confess the problem, obstruct the solution.

Smith also pushed for separating TSA funding from the broader DHS debate, pointing to the bipartisan Senate vote as justification.

"And we can have that debate and fund TSA if Mike Johnson would just let us vote on what every single senator, including Sen. Cotton, by the way, supported out of the Senate."

The argument has a surface logic. Nobody wants longer airport security lines. But the strategy is transparent: peel off the most publicly visible consequence of the shutdown, relieve the political pressure on Democrats, and then continue blocking full DHS funding indefinitely. Republicans have seen this play before. Fund the sympathetic pieces, starve the enforcement pieces, and declare victory.

Airports and the TSA Question

Airports across the country have been rattled by low TSA staffing levels, leading to longer security lines. President Trump responded by sending ICE officers to several airports to help ease the growing burden caused by TSA worker callouts. Trump said ICE officers would remain present at airports for "as long as it takes."

Smith insisted there was no reason to hold TSA funding hostage to the broader debate. "There's no reason not to pay TSA while we're having that other debate. And that's what we ought to be doing."

But there is a reason, and Smith knows it. Full DHS funding is the Republican position. Partial funding that carves out ICE is the Democratic position. The question is not whether TSA workers deserve paychecks. Of course they do. The question is whether Democrats will use their sympathy for TSA employees as a shield to continue undermining immigration enforcement.

The Deeper Pattern

The debate ostensibly traces back to the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal immigration authorities in Minneapolis earlier this year. Those deaths are a genuine tragedy, and any loss of life during enforcement operations warrants scrutiny and accountability.

But Democrats have leveraged that tragedy into a broad campaign to hamstring ICE operations nationwide. The leap from "investigate specific incidents" to "fundamentally restructure how immigration agents operate" is not proportionate. It is opportunistic. The same party that spent years denying the border was in crisis now demands that the agents addressing the crisis operate under conditions designed to slow them down.

Smith's Sunday admission reveals the bind Democrats find themselves in. They cannot defend Biden's border record because it is indefensible. They cannot fully embrace enforcement because their base won't tolerate it. So they land on a position that acknowledges the problem in the past tense while fighting the solution in the present tense.

The American public can see the contradiction. A party that let the border collapse does not get to dictate the terms of securing it.