Trump Sends ICE to Airports to ‘Help’ the TSA Agents He Won’t Pay
The deployment comes after Trump rejected Republicans’ offer to fund DHS without extra money for his masked, violent ICE agents.
Donald Trump deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to major airports across the US on Monday after the president reportedly rejected a deal from Republicans to pay TSA officers – because the plan would not immediately give the administration extra money for its domestic war on immigrants.
ICE agents descended on over a dozen airports, purportedly to “help” the TSA agents Trump is refusing to pay, including major hubs in New York, Atlanta, and Chicago. TSA agents have been working without pay for over a month since Congress deadlocked over funding the Department of Homeland Security, after Trump’s masked, violent federal agents were videotaped murdering two US citizens in Minneapolis.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, told CNN on Sunday that ICE would assist airport security “in areas that don’t need [TSA’s] specialized expertise,” such as guarding exit doors. But on Monday morning, Trump declared that ICE would make immigration arrests at airports, calling the locales “very fertile territory,” while also claiming the agents are “really there to help.” He also threatened to deploy the National Guard to airports if ICE is “not enough.”
Congress already gave ICE tens of billions of dollars in new funding last year. Placing highly paid ICE agents at airports to, in the best of scenarios, stand around watching unpaid TSA employees carry out essential duties is an insult to those workers, and a visual reminder to American travelers how their tax dollars are being wasted. There is also the risk that these ICE agents start violently kidnapping people.
Even congressional Republicans are losing patience with Trump’s prolonged fight for more ICE funding.
Over the weekend, GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune offered a solution to fund DHS without ICE, then later fund the controversial agency in a separate budget package. Trump rejected the plan, which Democrats have been pushing for weeks, effectively denying thousands of federal workers their paychecks for no reason other than it would mean admitting defeat.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, referring to his dangerous voter-suppression bill.
Trump allies followed suit.
“I’m glad the president put ICE in airports. That’ll drive the Democrats crazy,” said Republican House Oversight chair James Comer, while sidestepping Trump’s refusal to pay public servants.
Others in the party dissented. Senator Lisa Murkowski said deploying ICE to airports was a “bad idea.”
“Do you really want to have even additional tensions on top of what we are already facing?” the Alaska Republican said.
On Sunday, over 11% of the 50,000 TSA workers called out sick, setting a new record in this shutdown, and over 400 officers have quit.
Democrats have offered several bills to fund key parts of the Department of Homeland Security, including airport security officers, but Republicans have rejected all of them.
Sending ICE to airports will, of course, put more Americans and immigrants at risk of violent encounters – while also ensuring such incidents are widely shared on the internet.
Viral bystander videos captured on Sunday at San Francisco International Airport show plainclothes agents violently grabbing and arresting a woman as she cries out in distress, reportedly as her daughter watches. An airport spokesperson confirmed to NBC Bay Area that ICE detained a woman at the San Francisco airport Sunday night but said it was unrelated to Trump’s deployment of officers on Monday.
The ICE deployment comes as the agency and Trump’s immigration agenda bleed public support.
In a recent Economist/YouGov poll published March 3, half of Americans said they supported abolishing ICE entirely, the highest figure since YouGov began polling on that question.
“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,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday. “We have already seen how ICE conducts itself.”
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