People wait in a TSA line at the John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sunday in New York City.
Yuki Iwamura/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Yuki Iwamura/AP
President Trump said he is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports as some air travelers face longer security lines due to the partial government shutdown.
“On Monday, ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job,” Trump posted on social media Sunday.
The Trump administration has blamed Democrats for the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which has entered its sixth week and paused paychecks for Transportation Security Administration workers.
“This pointless, reckless shutdown of our homeland security workforce has caused more than 400 TSA officers to quit and thousands to call out from work because they are not able to afford gas, childcare, food, or rent,” Acting Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis told NPR in an email.
She said this has caused hours-long delays for travelers across the country, and said the agency will deploy “hundreds” of ICE officers “to airports being adversely impacted.”
DHS did not respond to NPR’s question of where ICE agents will be deployed.
But Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said Sunday evening that agents would be at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to help with “line management and crowd control.” In a statement, he said federal agents “indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities.”
The head of the union that represents TSA officers denounced the plan to send ICE to airports.
“ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Sunday.
He said TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats designed to evade detection at checkpoints.
“They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be,” he added.
The ACLU also issued a statement condemning the move, saying immigration agents at airports could “inspire fear among families.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., echoed that concern.
“The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or in some instances kill them,” Jeffries said on CNN.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, “is in charge” of the ICE deployment, Trump said. TSA and ICE are both part of DHS.
But it remains unclear exactly how the operation will work at airports.
“It’s a work in progress,” Homan said on CNN Sunday. “But we will be at airports tomorrow helping TSA move those lines along.”
Unclear duties for ICE agents
Homan said he is talking with the heads of ICE and TSA to finalize a plan, but said he expects ICE agents to relieve TSA agents of guard duty at some terminal entries and exits.
“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because they’re not trained in that,” Homan said. “There are certain parts of security that TSA is doing that we can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs, help move those lines.”
But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy seemed to have a different idea of what ICE agents could do at airports.
“They know how to run the X-ray machines because they are again under Homeland Security with TSA,” Duffy told ABC Sunday.
Duffy then warned that wait times at airports would get much worse if Congress doesn’t fund DHS by the end of next week, when TSA workers are set to miss another paycheck.
“I think you’re going to see more TSA agents — as we come to Thursday, Friday, Saturday of next week — they’re going to quit or they’re not going to show up,” Duffy said.
Scant negotiations progress
Last week, Congress failed to advance a DHS funding bill for the fifth time, leaving TSA, FEMA and other agencies in the lurch. ICE, on the other hand, still has plenty of funding after Congress allocated the the agency billions of dollars last summer as part of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The DHS shutdown started following the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal immigration agents in Minnesota. The killings sparked demands from Democrats to change ICE policy: a judicial warrant requirement, and a ban on ICE agents wearing masks, among other proposed changes.
It was not immediately clear whether ICE agents deployed to airports would wear masks, as many of them do during immigration enforcement.
Homan said he met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week to discuss DHS funding, but he gave no indication that a deal was nearing.
“More conversations need to be had because we certainly can’t surrender ICE’s authorities and their congressionally mandated job,” Homan said Sunday.
As for the ICE operation at airports, Homan said agents will continue to enforce immigration laws as they deploy to terminals and security lines.
NPR’s Jennifer Ludden contributed to this story.
