The stalemate in the U.S. Senate on whether and how to fund
the Department of Homeland Security has resulted in another opportunity to use
travel as a political lever at the expense of the American public. President
Donald Trump took to social media platform Truth Social on Saturday to announce
that he would install Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents at certain
U.S. airports starting Monday if Democrats refused to come to heel regarding full
funding for DHS, which includes both ICE and the Transportation Security
Administration. The latter has been operating without paying airport security screeners
since Feb. 14, resulting long security waits at airports due to massive sick-day
call outs and resignations across TSA’s ranks.
Trump positioned his original announcement on social
channels as threat, claiming about TSA work that “ICE will do the job far
better than ever done before!” and in another post added that ICE agents’ work
at airports would include "the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants
who have come into our Country."
Trump’s comments were posted shortly after Senate
Republicans in a rare Saturday vote blocked a Democratic effort to pass a
stand-alone bill to fully fund the TSA. That was just a day after Senate
Democrats sunk Republican efforts to pass a bill to fully fund DHS. It is not a
requirement to tie TSA worker pay to the rest of the funding for DHS, which has
been at the center of political controversy since the Trump administration began
deploying ICE agents in U.S. cities last fall using aggressive tactics to deport
undocumented immigrants, and in January also resulted in the killing of two
U.S. citizens in Minnesota and the detention of a five-year-old boy. Senate
Democrats have refused to approve full funding to DHS until ICE reforms are in
place.
The reality on the ground at the airport for travelers,
however, is that one-third of airport security screeners at major airports like
Bush International Airport in Houston and Hartford-Jackson International in
Atlanta had either quit or not shown up for work in recent days. Security lines
over the weekend grew to over three hours at both airports.
Those are the situations ICE will look to address, according
to Trump’s so-called Border Czar Tom Homan, who ratcheted Trump’s rhetoric way
down during an interview on CNN Sunday morning. Homan said ICE’s first objectives
would be to relieve TSA agents from guarding exits and certain sensitive areas so
they could concentrate on screening the thousands of would-be airline
passengers queuing in long lines.
“I don’t see an ice agent looking at an X-ray machine
because they’re not trained in that,” Homan said yesterday morning on CNN’s State
of the Union. “There are certain parts of security that TSA is doing, and we
can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs to help move
those lines.”
He added, however, that the discussions were ongoing about
exactly how to deploy ICE agents most effectively. And while not all the details
of the plan were defined by Sunday morning, “when we deploy tomorrow, we’ll have
a well-thought-out plan to execute.” When CNN called that into question, given
that DHS had little more than 24 hours to produce that plan, Homan pointed to
the fact that ICE agents have had other duties at airports for a long time,
including immigration investigations and enforcement. He emphasized the
objective in this effort, however, was to help TSA move security lines more quickly.
In addition to Atlanta and Houston, other airports understood
to be on the DHS target list include New York’s JFK and LaGuardia, Chicago O’Hare,
Newark Liberty, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Phoenix, according to the New
York Times.
Some observers have noted that ICE agents continue to be
paid during the shutdown, while TSA workers go without pay. Combining forces in
cooperative efforts at U.S. airports could foment resentment across TSA agents
still on the job.
ICE heroics or intrusions notwithstanding, U.S. Travel
Association president and CEO Geoff Freeman, sees everything short of
legislatively mandated pay for TSA workers as insufficient half-way-house
solutions.
He said in a statement on Thursday: "Congress is
leaving TSOs out in the cold for a second time in less than six months,
gambling with aviation safety and security while millions of travelers depend
on a workforce running on empty. They need to end the DHS shutdown. Now." USTA
has urged Congress to pass the Aviation Funding Solvency Act and the Aviation
Funding Stability Act, which would help ensure TSA workers never go without pay
during government shutdowns.