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 is threatening to replace the Transportation Security Administration officers who’ve worked without pay since February 14 with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Writing on Truth Social from his West Palm Beach, Florida golf course, Trump demanded that Democrats “immediately” reach an agreement to fund DHS and “let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again.”
He warned that a failure to fund the department 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.”
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.
But the law enforcement personnel working for ICE do not have any training in the airport security tasks overseen by TSA.
Continuing, Trump threatened to have the ICE agents he would deploy to airports effect “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.
“I look forward to seeing ICE in action at our Airports,” he added.
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 furloughed.
The result has been increasing chaos at American airports as travelers have been forced to wait in hours-long lines because not enough TSA officers have remained on the job.
Many of the 50,000 TSA officers 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. At least 366 officers have quit their jobs.
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.”
