When President Trump wanted to do something about the long lines at U.S. airports on Monday, he turned to one of his favorite tools: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Mr. Trump said he personally ordered that ICE agents be sent to manage crowds, amid a funding standoff that has led airport security workers to miss pay and not report to work. Unable to push congressional Democrats to approve funding for the Homeland Security Department without giving in on some immigration policies, he said ICE was an obvious choice to address the fallout.
“ICE,” he told reporters Monday, “was my idea.”
Mr. Trump has increasingly used ICE to try to achieve personal and political objectives, deploying a force with a quasi-military bearing around the country with a message that he intends to not just carry out his anti-immigration agenda but to also enforce his views on constituencies and states that have opposed him.
Last year, he sent officers into large Democratic-run cities as part of a highly visible immigration enforcement operation. He rushed teams to Minneapolis to pursue Somali immigrants accused of fraud in viral videos. Now, he is pushing agents to airports to help the Transportation Security Administration and pressure Democrats into folding in the weekslong shutdown fight.
On Monday, between 100 and 150 ICE agents were dispatched to more than a dozen airports across the country, according to one U.S. official. Pictures and videos of the agents, wearing vests with their agency’s name on them, showed them standing near identification processing locations and keeping guard. Some agents were seen walking around the terminal halls.
Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said it was “ludicrous” to assign political motives to the deployment.
“Because of the Democrat shutdown,” she said, “President Trump is using every tool available to help American travelers who are facing hours’ long lines at airports across the country — especially during this spring break and holiday season that is very important for many American families.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, also said Mr. Trump’s motives were not political. “Enforcing federal immigration law isn’t political — it’s the law,” she said.
The deployment of ICE agents to airports also seemed to be a nod to another point: that the agency’s increasingly intimidating reputation has some upsides for the administration. In his initial announcement about the mobilization, Mr. Trump said ICE officers would also be on hand to arrest unauthorized immigrants at airports, raising the specter of people being asked to show their citizenship papers or handcuffed amid the spring break travel rush.
In an apparent acknowledgment of the fact that some people might find the agents intimidating, he said he suggested that agents not wear masks while patrolling the airports. He said the look — which has spread among ICE officers in American communities over the past year — was not good for travelers coming off planes.
Some former ICE officials say Mr. Trump is doing harm to an organization that has struggled with its reputation and needs to maintain some independence from the president’s will.
“President Trump cannot help himself and is using ICE as a political battering ram,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior ICE official in the Biden administration. “ICE has an important public safety mission. It would be nice if the administration actually allowed them to do it — humanely, fairly and in compliance with the law and U.S. Constitution.”
Mr. Trump has been open about his view that ICE can help him with goals that go far beyond immigration enforcement. In a June directive to ICE officers on social media, he indicated that aiming his mass deportation campaign at Democratic-led cities could help Republicans electorally.
Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, he wrote, represented the “the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.”
In Minnesota, Mr. Trump deployed ICE to target people from Somalia, whom he has denigrated in comments widely denounced as bigoted, and has accused of committing an outsize amount of fraud. The Trump administration sent thousands of DHS agents to the state to approach businesses in the name of rooting out child care fraud.
The new airport deployment again puts ICE, which has struggled to retain support from Americans over the past year, at the heart of a political conflict. The agency is already dealing with the fallout of operations around the country, including the shootings of American citizens in Minneapolis, and is becoming the organization most connected to Mr. Trump’s contentious promise to conduct mass deportations.
ICE is accustomed to the political pendulum — from facing criticism from the right for relaxed enforcement during Democratic administrations, to protests from the left during Mr. Trump’s first administration. But the swing in the second Trump administration has aligned the agency with Mr. Trump himself.
The president said he suggested the idea of sending ICE officers to airports to Tom Homan, his border czar. Mr. Homan, a former leading ICE official, has said the idea made sense in part because ICE agents were familiar with security work.
“We’re trying to move the lines quicker and I think ICE can help,” Mr. Homan told Chris Cuomo on his SiriusXM show on Monday. “And I actually don’t think it’s going to last very long. I’m hoping we come to some sort of shutdown agreement to get the government open.”
It was unclear, however, what ICE officers’ exact duties were at the airports. Officers were observed walking in clusters through check-in areas and standing near exits, their faces mostly unmasked. Unlike T.S.A. agents, ICE personnel are being paid.
Darius Reeves, a former head of the ICE office in Baltimore, said that if the administration wanted to get T.S.A. staff members more help, it could have used agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection who are already in the airport doing security checks and passport verifications. That, he said, would have been a less politically charged decision.
Instead, he said, ICE is being used as a “political tool” to get back at Democrats. He described the agency as having “low morale” as a result of the continued controversies around its actions.
“It’s an absolute disaster,” he said. “We will become the most hated federal law enforcement agency — we will surpass the I.R.S.”
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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