Trump will deploy ICE agents into airports Monday unless DHS funding bill is passed: ‘Security like no one has ever seen’
With no end in sight to a partial government shutdown that has left most of the Department of Homeland Security without funds to operate, President Donald Trump threatened to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports to assist Transportation Security Administration officers as soon as Monday.
Writing on Truth Social from his West Palm Beach, Florida golf course Saturday, Trump demanded that Democrats “immediately” reach an agreement to fund DHS or they would force him to “move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before.”
He then followed that post up with another Sunday morning, stating that deployments would begin to airports the following day.
“On Monday, ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job despite the fact that the Radical Left Democrats, who are only focused on protecting hard line criminals who have entered our Country illegally, are endangering the USA by holding back the money that was long ago agreed to with signed and sealed contracts, and all,” wrote the president.
Immigration enforcement agents, like the Transportation Security Officers employed by TSA, are part of the sprawling homeland security apparatus created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, TSA agents have worked without pay since February 14
The law enforcement personnel working for ICE do not have any training in the airport security tasks overseen by TSA.
Trump said ICE agents deployed to airports would carry out “the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia” and accused Somalis in the U.S. — most of whom are U.S. citizens — of having “totally destroyed” Minnesota. Airports are not a major source of illegal immigration in the U.S., and the effects of this portion of his order are likely to be minimal if even noticeable at all.
“I look forward to seeing ICE in action at our Airports,” Trump wrote.
The approximately 50,000-strong TSA workforce has been forced to work without pay since a temporary DHS funding bill expired five weeks ago.
Democrats in Congress have demanded that any bill to fund the department include provisions to curb civil rights violations and other abuses committed by ICE, including prohibitions on agents covering their faces, the wearing of body-worn cameras and a requirement that agents obtain judicial warrants before entering private homes to arrest people sought for deportation.
But the Trump administration has refused to accede to most of those requests and has continued to fund immigration enforcement from a massive partisan spending package that was enacted last year while letting TSA and other DHS components remain on the job without pay or be furloughed.
The result has been increasing chaos at American airports as travelers have been forced to wait in hours-long lines due to a shortage of TSA staff.
Many of the those who work for the TSA are still grappling with debts incurred during last year’s 43-day government shutdown and are now just six days away from missing a second full paycheck. More than 400 TSA officers have quit since the shutdown began, according to NBC News.
Acting deputy TSA administrator Adam Stahl warned that the agency was “fully stretched.”
“If this continues, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that we may have to quite literally shut down airports,” Stahl said this week. “The reality of the situation is this is going to get worse before it gets better, if we don’t see any sort of action.”
A TSA spokesperson blamed Democrats for the situation in a statement to The Independent, accusing them of “shamelessly playing politics with national security” and “punishing hardworking TSA workers and their families.”
