President Donald Trump said that his decision to station ICE agents at airports is going so well that he might just supplement them with military reinforcements.
In a particularly confusing tangent from the 79-year-old president, Trump said during his speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual fundraising dinner on Wednesday night that his ICE airport gambit was a success, but that he might send National Guard troops, too.
“I sent ICE to the airports yesterday, and they have been so great,” Trump said, though his initiative actually began the day before that, on Monday. “And they didn’t need any rehabilitation in terms of the fake news, and they’re doing such an unbelievable job at the airports that they had one line that was four hours yesterday, and today was half an hour. Big, big difference.”
“And if we have to, we’re going to send in the National Guard, if we need to,” the president continued. “Because we have 6,000 ICE agents and we have 40,000 of the other people that they’re helping out, who really were forced because the Democrats don’t want to pay them.”
“The Democrats don’t want to pay them,” Trump said of TSA agents, who have not received a paycheck in over a month. “You have to remember that. The radical left Democrats need to get DHS back and open immediately.”
The threat follows a hint the president made earlier Wednesday morning in a post on Truth Social.
“Thank you to our great ICE Patriots for helping. It makes a big difference,” he wrote. “I may call up the National Guard for more help.”
Last month, Democrats refused to pass legislation to fund DHS without guarantees that ICE would reform its aggressive enforcement tactics. Since then, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly shot down Democratic bills aimed at reaching a consensus to reopen the Department of Homeland Security.
TSA employees have already worked 87 days without pay since the start of the 2026 fiscal year, which will total nearly $1 billion in unpaid payroll by March 27, the agency’s top official, Ha Nguyen McNeill, said on Wednesday.
GOP Senator John Kennedy shared during an appearance on Fox News’ The Will Cain Show on Tuesday that Trump himself killed a measure that would have put an end to the partial shutdown.
“No deals with the Democrats,” the Louisiana lawmaker said that Trump had told him and his MAGA colleague, Ted Cruz. “It would have worked. We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week.”
On Monday, ICE agents were deployed to 14 major airports nationwide to assist TSA employees amid the department’s staffing shortage. Dozens of images over the last three days have captured the federal officers lounging or loitering around the airports they have been assigned to.
Pascual Contreras, a TSA officer in Arizona, told the BBC that the decision didn’t make much sense.
“I don’t think we need them here,” he said. “We need to be paid. Why would you bring another agency to be TSA when you already have TSA?”
The last time Trump deployed the National Guard to do his bidding during his proposed crackdown on crime last year, federal troops were primarily seen picking up trash and spreading mulch as glorified Park Service workers.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House and the National Guard for comment.
