ICE officers will be on hand to prevent chaos at the world’s busiest airport, the city’s mayor confirmed Sunday.
Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was identified Sunday as one of the airports where ICE officers will be stationed on Monday, in an effort to ease passenger disruptions caused by a reduction in Transportation Security Administration staff.
The move comes as airports across the United States saw frantic scenes over the weekend, with security line wait times reaching up to three hours at some airports, as TSA employees went without their first paycheck since the partial government shutdown began last month.
Adding to the chaos was the sudden closure of New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night following a collision between an Air Canada plane and a Port Authority vehicle.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said that ICE officers would not be conducting their usual operations at the world’s busiest airport, stating, “federal officials have indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities.”
Dickens also said ICE offers “will report directly” to TSA for the duration of their deployment, which was threatened by President Donald Trump on Saturday.
However, in an interview with CNN on Sunday, Homan was directly asked whether ICE agents would conduct immigration searches as well as “crowd control” while stationed at airports.
“We do immigration enforcement at airports all the time,” Homan told CNN’s Dana Bash. “So is that going to change? It‘s not going to change. This is about helping the men and women with TSA. They‘ve lost several hundred employees. Lines are really slow because of the shutdown.”
Homan also discussed the crossover in training between ICE agents and TSA staff, saying his staff would provide “extra security” and would patrol airports for “as long as it takes.”
“ICE agents receive high-level training,” Homan stated. “ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already, they do a lot of criminal investigations on smuggling at airports.”
However, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN that passengers have the right to be wary of ICE agents at airports, given that federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.
“The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or in some instances kill them,” Jeffries said.
“We’ve already seen how ICE conducts itself. These are untrained individuals when it comes to doing the current job that they have for the most part, let alone deploying them in close exposure in highly sensitive situations at airports across the country.”
While on CNN, Homan defended the potential crossover in training between ICE agents and TSA staff, saying his staff would provide “extra security” and would patrol airports for “as long as it takes.”
“ICE agents receive high-level training,” Homan stated. “ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already, they do a lot of criminal investigations on smuggling at airports.”
He suggested an ICE officer could cover an exit to make sure passengers do not use it as an entry to the airport.
“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because they’re not trained in that,” Homan explained, saying they were working out the details of the operation during emergency meetings on Sunday. “But there are certain parts of security that TSA is doing that we can move them off those jobs and put them into specialized jobs to help move those lines.”
When Bash suggested if they were coming up with a plan in 24 hours it may not be well thought out, Homan said, “Look, how much of a plan does it mean to guard an exit, to make sure no one comes through that exit? And these officers are well trained in security and they‘re well trained in identification.”
On Sunday, Airports across the country were warning passengers of ongoing delays.
TSA staff have been working without pay since mid-February, when a lapse in funding to DHS triggered a partial government shutdown. It is the third time within six months TSA employees have been expected to work without pay.
Over 300 agents have quit, with absentee rates hitting 11.5 percent last Friday, the highest number yet recorded during the shutdown.
