Nearly 300 furloughed Department of Homeland Security employees are being called back to work amid the longest government shutdown in history.
Those federal workers — all from the E-Verify division of US Citizenship and Immigration Services — will be back on the job and the payroll starting Tuesday morning until a deal is reached to fund the parts of the government that are closed.
However, the E-Verify employees won’t be going back to their pre-shutdown jobs for now. Instead, they will be required to take on other responsibilities within Citizenship and Immigration Services. Employees will be assigned to jobs that are fee-funded, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Michael Bars.
Employees will receive the same pay rate they did before the shutdown.
Citizenship and Immigration Services and a portion of the Federal Emergency Management Agency make up the majority of the DHS workforce that continued to report to work and to be paid during the shutdown from other than annual appropriations, according to a DHS official.