Five-hour airport waits?! US gov’t shutdown causes traveler ‘chaos’ and Spring Break isn’t even in full swing

Passengers missed flights and endured hours of misery Sunday and Monday, waiting hours in security lines that stretched so far back they were in the parking garages at major U.S. airports.

Millions of families and college students heading off for early Spring Break have felt the double whammy of traveling during the peak travel season amid a partial government shutdown.

At the peak of the carnage over the weekend, some airports, including Houston’s William P. Hobby, warned passengers to arrive four to five hours early for their flights. By Tuesday, the airport advised arriving three hours early for domestic flights and four hours early for international flights.

A record-breaking 171 million are expected to fly as the school break period gets into full swing, according to Airlines for America, and the group estimates that airlines will carry 2.8 million passengers every day from March 1 through April 30.

Funding has run out to pay the salaries of Transportation Security Administration officers, some of whom have stopped showing up for work across some of the busiest airports in the U.S.

“Until Congress gets together and gets over this partisan division, [disruption] is going to continue, and the timing couldn’t be worse going into Spring Break, when more people travel,” Dan Bubb, a professor of aviation history and commercial aviation at the University of Las Vegas and a former airline pilot, told The Independent.

“You’re going to continue to see very long lines [of] four or five, six hours,” Bubb said.

At William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas, passengers described hellish scenes Sunday and Monday.

Realtor Jessica Dillard said the line was so long on Sunday that her family missed their flight to Provo, Utah, and ended up having to cancel their whole trip.

Dillard said she had “no clue” that there was a partial government shutdown until she walked into the terminal, and claimed the airline she was supposed to be flying with, Allegiant, did not give the family any warning.

“We just walked into utter chaos,” Dillard told The Independent.

Dillard and her husband Matthew, from Galveston, Texas, had been looking forward to the trip with their 8-year-old son Grayson for weeks.

But despite ensuring they got to the airport three hours early, they had to abandon their plans after standing in line for more than two hours, knowing that they would miss their flight.

“This is my 8 year old’s only spring vacation,” Dillard said. “He’s been looking forward to this so much, we would have showed up at three in the morning if we would have known.”

To make matters worse, the trip was the first the family has been able to take since Dillard’s husband fell seriously unwell last year.

“My husband is actually sick, he’s got multiple auto immune diseases, this was the first time we’ve been able to travel in quite a while,” Dillard explained. “And my little boy, it’s his Spring Break, and we’re off to visit his godfather in Utah, and he was super excited about it, he was telling all his little classmates for weeks.”

Dillard and her husband said that they are frustrated by the lack of communication about the disruption from the airline and TSA.

Allegiant apologized to Dillard and other passengers who experienced delays over the weekend.

“We understand how frustrating this situation can be and we regret any disruption it caused,” the airline said in a statement to The Independent. “Although TSA screening times are challenging to predict and are beyond any airlines’ control, we make every attempt to communicate updates to our booked passengers as we learn them.”

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport was another hub hard hit by punishing delays over the weekend.

Martial arts instructor Kevin Bergquist was caught in the chaos Sunday in New Orleans on his way home to Bradenton, Florida. “It was the craziest line I have ever been a part of,” he told The Independent, and said he only made his flight to Tampa by 30 seconds.

The 47-year-old said he couldn’t believe it when he saw the security line was “three levels deep” in the parking garage, where tensions were running high.

“Some people are, I guess, naturally less patient than others,” he said. “It was a highly emotional charged line in sections, and then other parts, like my little group, we were just kind of laughing at everybody freaking out.”

While he managed to keep his spirits up, Bergquist said he felt for the families whose children were “having meltdowns” out of boredom, and for the elderly people who were waiting in the line with canes and walkers.

“I thought, that’s going to be hard for them to stand in line for three hours. So I hope they were able to make accommodations for them,” he said.

Bergquist said he was not aware of the partial government shutdown until he was in line for TSA, and claimed many others around him also had no idea.

“Nobody understood that there was a shutdown,” he said. “And everyone’s, like, ‘what the hell’s going on here?’”

While the situation had improved Tuesday, airports still warned travelers to allow extra time for security, and experts anticipate that long lines are likely to return heading into the weekend.

Bubb warned that any big vacation spots, like Florida for Orlando and Miami, will bear the brunt of the disruption, in addition to hubs like Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago O’Hare where people catch connecting flights.

And the professor said that voters will remember these experiences when they go to the polls in the fall for the 2026 midterms.

“This is definitely going to affect how people vote, particularly business travelers, who have to travel a lot,” said Bubb. “We’re already seeing higher ticket prices because of oil prices, grocery prices have been inflated — it’s been a really tough time for this country, and when you just add more of this to it, it just gets worse.”

“Voters are really looking at this closely, and they’re going to look for somebody to blame,” Bubb added. “And they’re going to look at our current Congress.”

The Department of Homeland Security has blamed Democrats for the shutdown, which began on February 14, and said Spring Break was “under siege” in social media posts on official government accounts.

“The Democrats’ DHS shutdown has led to HOURS long security lines at airports across the country, leading Americans to miss their spring break flights,” a post on Homeland Security’s Facebook page said Sunday. “There is ZERO reason for spring break travel to be held hostage for political points — Democrats must end this DHS shutdown NOW.”

Democratic lawmakers have said the department won’t get funded until new restrictions are placed on federal immigration operations following the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year.

Chris Sununu, president and CEO of Airlines for America, urged Congress and the Trump administration to act.

“We are in spring break travel season and expecting record numbers of people to take to the skies,” Sununu said. “Airlines have done their part to prepare; now Congress and the administration must act with urgency to reach a deal that reopens DHS and ends this shutdown.”

“America’s transportation security workforce is too important to be used as political leverage,” he added.