Donald Trump’s impulsive weekend decision to deploy U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the nation’s airports to do the jobs of TSA agents not being paid by the administration, put his border czar on the spoton CNN.
Early Sunday morning, the frustrated president said ICE would pulled from their jobs grabbing immigrants off the street to help out at airports plagued by TSA sick-outs and that Homan would be responsible for getting it done.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Tom Homan, who inherited former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s duties after she was fired, was pressed by host Dana Bash over training for agents who have no airport security experience .
According to Homan, it is a “work in progress” and details are still be worked out before the Monday deadline.
“Are ICE agents even remotely trained to handle security at airports?” the CNN host asked.
“Ice agents receive high-level training,” Homan insisted. “And, you know, ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already. They do a lot of investigation, criminal investigation on smuggling reports. But, you know, there’s, I mean, there’s a lot TSA agents covering exits, you know, people that enter through the exits. You know, certainly a highly trained ICE law enforcement officer can cover an exit that makes people don’t go through those exits entering the airport, through the exits. That stuff like that relieves that TSA officer to go to screening and to, to reduce those lines. “
“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an x-ray machine because they’re not trained in that,” he admitted.
After the Trump official elaborated, “So hopefully we’ll have all those answers here by this afternoon, but we’re working on it. And when we deploy tomorrow, we’ll have a well-thought-out plan to execute,” the skeptical CNN host asked, “With respect, if you’re doing this in 24 hours, how well thought out could it possibly be?”
“Again, ICE has been at airports across the country for a long time. It’s just expanding those things,” Homan pushed back. “Look, it does it –– how much of a plan does it mean to guard an exit, to make sure no one comes through that exit? And we’re talking about security options. And these officers are well-trained in security and they’re well-trained in identification. And we’re going to do what we can to help TSA move those people through the line.”
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