ICE agents deployed by President Donald Trump to “help” overwhelmed airport workers are apparently getting paid to mostly mill about or chat with one another.
The president sent in the cavalry, ostensibly, to help with long security lines amid TSA staffing shortages caused by the partial government shutdown. He bragged about the idea with a bizarre analogy, comparing it to the invention of the humble paperclip. “It was so simple. And everybody that looked at it said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” the 79-year-old said Monday.
What has ensued, however, is what seems to be a lot of aimless wandering by federal agents with nothing to do. Having not been trained to operate the security checkpoints that are the primary source of airport delays, they’ve been spotted leaning up against walls and over railings, grabbing Starbucks, chatting in groups or even handing out water to travelers.
One group of agents in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia could not give an answer on what they were supposed to be doing, according to MS NOW.
In a video titled “What is ICE actually doing at the airports,” a reporter from the channel said she had asked them what their “mission” entailed, and they responded, off camera, that it was to “support TSA officers.”
“I asked them what that meant, they didn’t clarify,” she added.
CNN reported that a group of agents in that same airport was observed Monday wandering and chatting with each other for several hours.
Trump’s order has even reportedly baffled those in the federal government expected to carry it out. A DHS source told CBS News over the weekend that the department, which oversees ICE, was blindsided by Trump’s decision. One official put it plainly: “I have no idea what we’re doing.”
This feeling seems pervasive across all 14 of the airports manned by Trump’s immigration goons. Daniela Dominguez in Atlanta told the BBC that she thinks the presence of agents “makes a lot of people nervous.”
In Phoenix, Arizona, TSA officer Pascual Contreras couldn’t understand the move.
“I don’t think we need them here. We need to be paid, why would you bring another agency to be TSA when you already have TSA?” he said to the BBC. He added that he and his colleagues are specifically trained, whereas the ICE agents are not.
“Any time somebody interferes with that, it just throws one more wrench in the cog,” Contreras said.
An unnamed ICE agent sent to the airport in Phoenix told the Tucson Sentinel, “If anything we feel sorry for the TSA agents, they’re the ones not getting paid.”
Traveler Kristin Carey said that while she thinks it’s “helpful” for the travelers in some ways, she thinks it’s “unnecessary” for the government to withhold services that taxpayers have paid for.
“It’s scary, I’m scared,” a tearful Diane Price said.
Donna Troupe’s assessment was perhaps most telling. She said she has no problem with ICE being present, but added, “But they’ve just been standing [around], the points I’ve seen them, they’ve just been standing around talking.”
Around 61,000 TSA employees have gone without pay since the partial government shutdown began in mid-February. More than 400 officers have already quit, and absences are running at record levels.
Jeff Price, a professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver and a former assistant security director at Denver Airport, told Travel Weekly that the deployment is potentially just a political stunt. He added that if they engage in immigration enforcement, they could actually make wait times worse.
“If they cross that line, then the literal lines are going to back up massively,” he said.
It appears that Trump’s master plan is having little positive effect. At Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston on Tuesday morning, a four-hour wait debilitated travelers, with lines stretching from the security checkpoint all the way back to the airport subway, according to ABC News.
Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson was still advising passengers to allow at least four hours despite some improvement from Monday, when lines had spilled out of terminal doors entirely. Over 30 percent of TSA workers called out sick at both JFK and Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall Airport on Monday, while nationwide more than 3,200 TSA officers failed to show up for work that same day.
The chaos even delayed a member of the National Transportation Safety Board team dispatched to investigate a deadly crash at LaGuardia, after their air traffic control specialist was stuck in a Houston security line for three hours.
“Our air traffic control specialist, who was in line with TSA for three hours until we called in Houston to beg to see if we can get her through so we can get here,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said. “So, it’s been a really big challenge to get the entire team here, and they’re still arriving as I speak.”
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan claimed the presence of ICE agents at airports has already made a big difference for travelers—while also clumsily overselling their role to such an extent that it seemed only to highlight the pointlessness of their mission.
“The wait lines already dropped. Plus, we’re doing a security, uh, function at the airports,” he told Fox News on Monday.
“We’re going to arrest criminals going through this airport. We’re going to look for human trafficking, sex trafficking, money, you know, um, money smuggling,” he said.
DHS and the White House have been contacted for comment.
