The national shortage of Transportation Security Administration workers made for a miserable Sunday at New York City airports, where confusion, exasperation and impatience reigned as travelers waited in line for hours.
The T.S.A. crisis, tied to a partial government shutdown that has meant thousands of employees have been working without pay, hit especially hard at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, where passengers were waiting at least three hours to go through security.
It was unclear whether ICE agents, whom President Trump has said he will send to airports around the nation on Monday, would come to New York, and whether their presence would help or make matters even worse.
At LaGuardia ’s Terminal B, the line for T.S.A. checkpoints stretched through the building on Sunday afternoon. When travelers weren’t checking their phones or commiserating with one another — asking “How long have you been in line?” — they tried to catch the attention of airport staff members for updated information.
Stephanie Kisgen, 44, an interior designer from Richmond Hill, Ga., and her husband, Patrick Kisgen, arrived at the airport four hours early for their 6:30 p.m. flight and weren’t sure if they would make it.
They had come to New York for a Stephen Wilson Jr. concert in Brooklyn. After an hour and 15 minutes in line, Ms. Kisgen said she anticipated two more hours of waiting but that she didn’t really know. “I’m expecting the worst,” she said, a glass of white wine in hand.
Jill Anderson, 49, an IT director from Chicago, also arrived four hours early with her daughter, Mary. They had come to the city to tour Fordham and Pace universities.
They were toward the end of the line for T.S.A. PreCheck, which stretched all the way to the entrance to the terminal.
Diana Greene-Chandon, 55, a neurologist from St. Louis, was flying home after visiting her daughter in graduate school at N.Y.U.
“I fly a lot, so this is probably the worst I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “And this is the line for T.S.A. PreCheck. It’s like seven or eight loops. And then you finally get into this line, which I don’t know how many more loops we’re going to have to do.”
At Kennedy Airport’s Terminal 4, the wait times were somewhat less painful, between one and two hours, though lines were snaking down hallways and across the concourse.
Addison Freeman, 33, a musician from Austin, Texas, said the board predicted his wait was only going to be an hour, and that he was crossing his fingers.
Like many of the travelers, Mr. Freeman was dubious about President Trump’s plan to begin using ICE agents on Monday to help at the airports. In a social media post on Saturday, Mr. Trump, who is pressuring congressional Democrats to agree to a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Transportation Security Administration, said agents would “do security like no one has ever seen before.” It would include “the immediate arrest of all illegal immigrants who have come into our Country,” he wrote.
“Having ICE agents perform T.S.A. jobs makes me nervous because they’re not trained to do the job,” Mr. Freeman said.
Ms. Anderson, at LaGuardia, blamed the president for the airport chaos. “The whole thing’s his fault,” she said, “I mean, if he were a decent human being, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. And I don’t know, I don’t trust ICE agents are trained for this.”
Mr. Kisgen was more receptive to the idea of ICE agents at the airport. “I think anything is better than this,” he said.
At JFK, Harry Rondos, 49, a waiter from Manhattan who was seeing his father, Nestor Rondos, 84, off for a flight back to his native island of Corfu, Greece, said U.S. airports were an embarrassment.
“We’re a Third World country now,” he said. “We’re supposed to be the richest country in the world, and we have the worst experience.”
He was not a fan of ICE taking over T.S.A. work. “You saw what happened in Minnesota,” he said.
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