Facing record-high wait times at airport security checkpoints, President Donald Trump turned to an idea that gained traction after a woman from Arizona called into a right-wing talk radio show: send in immigration agents.
The result has not reduced security lines, according to data from affected airports. Fliers on Wednesday were still taking four or more hours to clear security at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where unpaid Transportation Security Administration agents skipping shifts have sharply reduced screenings.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that wait times hadn’t decreased “as much as we’d like.” She did not address a question on whether stationing ICE agents at airports has affected their work on deportations.
The deployment also has not broken the impasse over funding the Department of Homeland Security, which would restore TSA’s pay. Senate Democrats are holding out for more legal restraints on immigration agents, a demand that stems from agents’ killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. Democrats sent the White House a new offer Wednesday, after rejecting a proposal from the chamber’s Republican leaders that would have funded TSA and other parts of DHS now and dealt separately with deportations.
“They’ll ask for something, we’ll give them that concession, and then they say, ‘Oh, wait, that’s not enough, actually,’” Leavitt said of the Democrats on Wednesday. “They want to distract, I think, from the success of our military overseas right now, totally obliterating the Iranian regime.”
Trump floated escalating things by deploying the National Guard. The White House did not elaborate.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) said Trump’s decision to send ICE to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and other airports was not affecting negotiations to end the shutdown that has dragged on for more than a month. He dismissed Trump’s threat to send the National Guard to airports, too.
“It’s just another theatrical play by the president,” Durbin said.
Trump said he came up with the idea of sending ICE agents to airports himself, comparing its brilliance to the invention of the paper clip.
“One hundred and 82 years ago, a man discovered the paper clip. It was so simple, and everybody that looked at it said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ ICE was my idea,” Trump told reporters Monday. “The first person I called was Tom Homan, I said ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I think it’s great.’”
Many observers noted that Trump announced the idea a day after a caller identifying herself as “Linda from Arizona” proposed the same plan on “Clay and Buck,” a popular conservative talk radio show. Clay Travis, one of the hosts, championed the idea on air as “brilliant” and repeated it when appearing on Fox News later on Friday.
Trump posted on Truth Social the next morning that he would soon deploy ICE agents to airports as a way to relieve TSA agents and pressure Democrats into making a deal.
The show’s hosts, Travis and Buck Sexton, saw the timing as evidence that their caller had influenced national policy.
“There was no record of anybody making this suggestion before,” Travis said in an interview. “[Linda] put that idea into the intellectual world of Trump, and it found its way to him.”
At Travis’s request, Trump autographed a hat to send to Linda, he said. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about where Trump’s idea originated.
Trump said the ICE agents would “help” TSA and “do Security like no one has ever seen before.” Since the deployment, the White House has promoted videos of ICE agents handing out water bottles or holding spots in line for people to take bathroom breaks. Other viral bystander videos showed agents standing around idly at airport doors or baggage claim.
“I see them all sitting down looking at their phones or chit-chatting,” Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Michigan) said at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday. “It looks like they have no role to play.”
TSA agents normally receive four to six months of training to operate specialized machinery at checkpoints, the agency’s acting administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, told the committee. ICE agents have been helping with less specialized tasks such as operating the machine that checks IDs, directing lines and helping passengers load bins, she said.
“They’ve been incredibly helpful to alleviate the burden on our workforce, and we’re getting positive feedback from our passengers and field leadership alike,” McNeill said.
The White House also promoted a video showing a clear checkpoint at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Tuesday. But Aaron Barker, a union representative for TSA officers in the Southeast, said ICE officers haven’t helped run screenings there.
“There are peak days and non-peak days,” he said. “If you see shorter lines on a Tuesday or Wednesday, that’s expected.”
At other airports, such as Philadelphia’s, waits never topped 20 minutes before or after Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived.
Some foreign-born travelers and workers reported discomfort with the presence of ICE officers or decided to stay away, but the officers have not provoked widespread panic or protests. The White House and DHS did not respond to questions about how many arrests ICE has made at airports this week. A widely publicized arrest in San Francisco of a Guatemalan woman with an active deportation order occurred before ICE deployed to airports on Monday, DHS said on social media.
“ICE agents don’t know the first thing about airport security,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday on the floor of the chamber. “Just because something popped into Donald Trump’s head — put ICE agents at the airports — and his administration just says, ‘Yes, sir,’ even though they know it’s a ridiculous idea, doesn’t mean we should continue it.”
Shortages of TSA agents and air traffic controllers contributed to pressure to end the previous partial government shutdown in November, on top of interruptions in food stamps. The political fallout from the current standoff is not yet clear. Fewer than half of Americans fly at least once a year, according to a survey by the airlines’ trade group. In public polling, reactions are mixed, with about a third of U.S. adults saying they weren’t sure of either party’s positions on DHS funding, according to CBS News/YouGov survey conducted last week.
Sexton, the talk radio co-host, said Trump deserved praise for unorthodox thinking about how to address political standoffs.
“They’re taking this outside-the-box action, which I think, at a minimum, shows the public that Republicans are trying to fix this,” he said.
Negotiations between the two parties remain stalled. Senate Republicans sent Democrats an offer Tuesday to fund DHS except for the part of ICE charged with arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants, known as Enforcement and Removal Operations. Schumer complained that Republicans’ offer did not include any of the restrictions on federal immigration agents that Democrats have demanded. Democrats were concerned that other parts of DHS were participating in the administration’s deportation operations — for instance, a Customs and Border Protection officer and a Border Patrol agent shot Alex Pretti, one of the two U.S. citizens killed in Minneapolis.
“It’s an illusory solution if they can man ICE with people from these other” parts of DHS, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told reporters.
Democrats countered Wednesday with a proposal that would include some restrictions the White House already agreed to, according to a Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Those provisions include requiring federal agents to wear identification and body cameras and restricting them from operating near places such as hospitals and schools. The White House already offered those concessions to Democrats, officials said in a letter to Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Katie Britt (R-Alabama) last week.
But Republicans have balked at agreeing to those demands in a deal that funds only part of ICE instead of the entire agency. Democrats also want new restrictions on warrants and a ban on agents wearing masks, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said Wednesday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) accused Democrats of being unreasonable. “I don’t know how they will ever satisfy their crazy, online political base,” he told reporters.
A White House official called the Democrats’ demands “laughable.”
“The administration has repeatedly tried to work in good faith with the Democrats while always remaining consistent: we want the department funded and we will continue to enforce the law,” the official said. “This latest stunt from the Democrats proves they are not interested in a serious conversation and they don’t care that their shutdown is hurting Americans.”
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump took a friendly question from a correspondent for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s streaming channel, inviting Trump to address Americans stuck in airports “because Democrats won’t fund DHS.”
“What’s devastating?” Trump asked the correspondent to repeat the question, apparently struggling to hear. He then went on to recite tax cuts from last year’s spending deal, praise Democrats for sticking together, and attack two Kentucky Republicans, Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie.
On Wednesday, he praised ICE agents on social media, saying their presence at airports was improving their public image. He said he asked agents not to wear masks in airports like they have done on patrols; stopping officers from covering their faces has been one of Democrats’ demands in funding negotiations. Sixty percent of Americans viewed ICE unfavorably in a February AP-NORC poll, up from 37 percent in 2018.
“The Public is loving ICE, so the Democrats, unwittingly, did us a favor,” Trump said. “They are Great American Patriots, they just happen to have much larger, and harder, muscles than most.”
Meryl Kornfeld and Scott Clement contributed reporting.
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