ICE agents have begun their temporary rotations supporting the Transportation Security Administration in airports across the United States. The deployment, which Donald Trump announced over the weekend, comes after the president reportedly rejected a standalone proposal to fund the TSA amid an ongoing stalemate over the Department of Homeland Security’s budget.
Airports across the country have been beleaguered by absurdly long security lines as TSA agents have been refusing to work without pay as DHS funding remains frozen. TSA’s budget is a casualty of the larger battle over DHS agents’ behavior over the first year of the Trump administration. Democrats have been holding up the department’s funding for weeks, demanding substantial changes to oversight and accountability for immigration enforcement — including making judicial warrants a requirement for arrests, and prohibiting agents from concealing their identity using masks or other means. Trump and Republicans are refusing to play ball.
Trump announced the deployment on Saturday in a Truth Social post, writing that he would be moving our “brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before,” and that their duties would entail “the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”
Despite TSA agents undergoing months of specialized training, immigration czar Tom Homan scoffed at concerns about ICE’s lack of this training during an interview with CNN a day later. “How much of a plan does it mean to guard an exit to make sure no one comes through that exit?” he asked host Dana Bash.
Trump doesn’t seem too concerned with solving the issue. He was playing golf over the weekend (despite bashing Obama for golfing while TSA was “falling apart” in 2016), and hasn’t been playing ball with Congress on the issue.
According to a Monday report from Punchbowl News, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) brought a proposal to the White House: Republicans would support a bill to fund all of DHS except ICE, whose brutal tactics led to the shutdown, and Democrats were on board. Trump, according to sources who spoke to Punchbowl, said no.
Why reject a deal that could potentially solve a growing PR crisis for the administration? Well, Trump and the White House seem to believe that they can pin the chaos at airports on Democrats, and now they are siccing already unpopular ICE agents on already-stressed-out travelers. In a Monday press gaggle, Trump told reporters it was his idea to send ICE to airports. “That was like the paperclip. Do you know the story of the paperclip? 182 years ago a man discovered the paperclip. It was so simple. And everybody that looked at it thought: ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ICE was my idea,” the president said.
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On Sunday night, Trump told News Nation that he didn’t think “any deal should be made on this until they approve SAVE America,” the election reform legislation proposed by Republicans that would require Americans to present in-person proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The comments echoed statements Trump shared over the weekend on Truth Social, in which he not only demanded the SAVE Act be passed, but that it include “Voter I.D., (with picture!), Citizenship to Vote, No Mail-In Voting (with exceptions), All Paper Ballots, No Men In Women’s Sports, and No Transgender MUTILIZATION of our precious children.”
“Let Leader Thune clearly identify those few ‘Republicans’ that are Voting against AMERICA. They will never be elected again!” Trump wrote.
Wait lines in airports are exceeding four hours in some cities. As travellers begin sharing the first images of ICE agents “helping” out at security checkpoints on Monday, they don’t seem to be doing much besides looming over workers, and patrolling corridors. ICE agent salaries are not being affected by the shutdown, so while TSA staff are working without pay, the Trump administration has now saddled the airport security agents with glorified situation monitors who are not actually trained to help with the core functions of their job.
From Rolling Stone US
