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.
Tags: U.S.DHS ICE U.S. Travel Association Geoff Freeman U.S. Airports