Donald Trump has bizarrely claimed that people now love ICE agents after he told them to remove their masks while deployed to airports.
During a typically rambling speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) annual fundraising dinner in Washington, D.C., the 79-year-old even took credit for the apparent shift in public attitudes toward ICE, apparently oblivious to the fact that his own critics were the ones to warn against federal immigration agents wearing masks in the first place.
“Now, I must tell you, when I first sent them in two days ago, I looked and they were wearing masks—and I think they have to, because a lot of bad people—but in an airport? No,” Trump said Wednesday.
“I said, ‘Fellas, do you mind taking off your masks in the airport?’ And they took them off, and people said, ‘Wow, these are nice guys.’ And they’re helping the people with their bags. They’re moving things along. It’s a beautiful thing to see,” Trump added. “People are starting to say, ‘ICE, you’re nice guys. We really appreciate it.’”
Trump made the strange decision this week to send ICE agents to airports across the country to assist with long lines and travel chaos, as thousands of unpaid Transportation Security Administration employees have not been showing up to work during the partial government shutdown.
At the center of the standoff causing the shutdown, among other things, is a demand from Democratic lawmakers that federal immigration agents stop wearing masks. Trump and his Republican allies have refused to budge, however.
There has been confusion about how the untrained immigration agents would actually help screen passengers through security or speed up waiting times at airports.
Photos from airports across the country have gone viral showing groups of ICE agents standing around, looking at their phones, or taking coffee breaks rather than actually working.
A Department of Homeland Security source told CBS News they had no idea Trump would deploy ICE to airports and were not even sure how the agents would help. “I have no idea what we’re doing,” one official told the network.
“What I’m getting from some of the officers is that they’re just in the way,” Pascual Contreras, a TSA employee and union official in Phoenix, Arizona, told Reuters. “On a personal level, I don’t think we need them here, we need to be paid.”
Earlier this month, a Fox News poll found that a record-high 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the job ICE is doing.
Backlash to Trump’s hardline and aggressive immigration and deportation tactics intensified earlier this year after two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis within the space of a few weeks.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said: “TSA is extremely grateful to the patriotic men and women of ICE who have deployed to airports that are facing a high number of callouts because of the Democrats’ shutdown. ICE officers are guarding entrances and exits, assisting with logistics, and doing crowd control.
“The more support we have available, the more efficiently TSA can focus on their highly specialized screening roles to get airport security lines moving faster.”
