U.S. homeland security chief frustrated at Congress failing to pass funding bill

Xinhua

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As another partial U.S. government shutdown looms large at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid mounting security challenges, DHS chief Jeh Johnson said Sunday that he was frustrated with Congress on failing to pass a DHS funding bill so far.

"I'm a little frustrated, frankly, because when I talk to my friends on the Senate side, they say go talk to the House," said Johnson in an interview aired on U.S. TV network ABC.

"When I go talk to my friends on the House side, they say 'It's not me. I passed my bill. Go talk to the Senate,'" he added.

Johnson's remarks came one day after al-Qaeda-linked terror group al-Shabaab released a video instigating jihadists to carry out attacks on large-scale shopping malls in the West.

Johnson warned that the video indicated the evolvement of terrorist attacks from centralized ones to more decentralized and diffuse forms, where independent actors were encouraged to strike with little notice to the intelligence community.

"So that's one of the reasons why it's imperative that we have a budget for the Department of Homeland Security, which is due to expire at the end of the week," Johnson said.

The DHS would shut down on Saturday should Congress fail to pass a funding bill.

Congressional Republicans have already passed a funding bill with measures to roll back U.S. President Barack Obama's controversial executive orders on immigration.

The bill got stuck in Senate, where Democratic senators blocked the debates of the bill by filibuster three times and demanded a "clean" funding bill.

After a week-long President's Day recess, a fourth vote on the Senate floor on the House-passed funding bill is slated for Monday.

Meanwhile, after a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked Obama's executive actions, many powerful Republicans, including Senator John McCain, Obama's Republican rival in his first 2008 bid for the White house, said during the weekend that Obama's executive actions on immigration should be resolved by the Supreme Court, not Congress.

However, McCain did not voice explicit support for a clean DHS funding bill without riders to defund Obama's executive actions. Enditem