There are few situations so bad that they can’t be made worse by adding ICE: Your house is on fire? Here’s ICE! Now your house is still on fire, and someone has entered it with a “judicial warrant” to rifle through your burnt belongings. You’ve just suffered a massive cranial injury and don’t remember any of your rights? ICE is here—and it doesn’t remember your rights either.
Seeing the chaos at airports as TSA employees enter another week without pay, Donald Trump has decided to add ICE. Yes, ICE, the very government agency whose treatment of citizens and noncitizens alike has been so egregious that legislators have put Department of Homeland Security funding on hold.
Who will help at the airport? How about the people whose only experience with planes is putting people on them against their will, to never see their families again? Say what you want about the TSA, but it is at least trying to get you safely to your family in a place where you are intending to go.
The good news is that, as everyone keeps observing, the airport is a notoriously calm place where people are always at their best. This is due to Sean Duffy’s sterling leadership as secretary of transportation. Before his tenure, there were some problems. People sometimes got a horrifying glimpse of a fellow traveler in pajamas. And families got the one call you never want to get from a loved one who was traveling by plane: “Sweetheart, my plane just landed safely and I am fine, but I can’t see a SINGLE PULL-UP BAR ANYWHERE IN THIS AIRPORT!” Fortunately, Duffy solved both of these issues. Now he is resting on his laurels, and perhaps when he is good and rested he will look into modernizing the air-traffic-control system (not urgent at this time).
Will the presence of ICE help with the TSA overwhelm? The White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, has suggested that “certainly, a highly trained ICE law-enforcement officer can cover an exit—make sure people don’t go through those exits, enter an airport through the exits. And stuff like that relieves that TSA officer to go to screening and to reduce those lines.” That’s probably the biggest problem at airports right now. I have to assume that the six-hour-plus lines at Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson airport are 50 percent people who are going through the wrong door, so we can look for a decrease in wait time of three hours once this radical suggestion is implemented.
Otherwise, ICE agents can just stand there, not looking at X-ray machines. (“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine,” Homan said, because they are “not trained in that.”) This marks the first time in the existence of Trump-era ICE that a lack of training has prevented agents from doing something.
So far, the addition of ICE to monitor doors and not look at X-ray machines has, fascinatingly, not instantly solved our airport problems. Indeed, it is hard to think of a set of people less equipped to improve anything about the airport situation. This is like asking a tarantula to watch your laptop. It won’t help, and now everyone is scared. No, I’m sorry. This is unfair to tarantulas, who are not known for their racial profiling.
The best-case scenario with ICE agents at the airport is that they stand around unhelpfully, doing nothing. The worst-case scenario is that going to the airport will now require some kind of ICE Pre-Check subscription to avoid having lethal force deployed against you for no reason.
On top of all this, Trump is instructing ICE not to wear masks during its airport deployment, on the grounds that these masks are not necessary. But how can this be? ICE needed its masks before to face down its most dangerous foes (children in bunny hats, harried moms, restaurant workers), and the airport is overflowing with those. How can we rob agents of this key tool at this time? There is no way they will be able to face such deadly enemies as children in strollers, families traveling together, seniors, members of the military, and others with preferred-boarding status. If they don’t need masks in airports, they don’t need masks anywhere.
The post Shockingly, ICE Hasn’t Fixed the Airport Crisis appeared first on The Atlantic.
