ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is now starring in Trump administration airport propaganda.
A slickly produced video featuring the Homeland Security chief began airing Thursday on airport monitors across the country, blaming Democrats for the nine-day-old government shutdown that has already caused massive flight delays and left thousands of aviation employees working without pay.
“Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted and most of our TSA employees are working without pay,” Noem says in the clip, which a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to Reuters is now being blasted out in airports nationwide. The Daily Beast has asked for additional comment.
The Trump administration’s message dropped into a travel system already buckling under strain. Since Monday, more than 20,000 U.S. flights have been delayed—including 4,600 on Thursday alone—as the Federal Aviation Administration struggles to maintain operations with thousands of unpaid air traffic controllers.
About 13,000 controllers and 50,000 TSA officers are still required to report for duty during the shutdown, but they won’t receive a paycheck until it ends.
TSA insists that “wait times remain low,” saying it screened roughly 2.4 million passengers on Wednesday with an average wait of just over six minutes. But officials privately admit the calm may not last, suggesting that as the shutdown drags on, more workers are expected to call in sick or quit outright, raising the specter of longer lines and mounting safety risks.
Democrats blasted Noem’s video as a cynical attempt to shift blame. “Every day that Republicans refuse to negotiate to end this shutdown, the worse it gets for Americans—and the clearer it becomes who’s fighting for them,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday.
The shutdown began Oct. 1 after Congress failed to pass a new spending bill. Democrats have refused to approve the Republican-backed stopgap plan, which omits funding to subsidize health insurance for low-income Americans. Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Democrats of holding the government hostage over social spending.
Many government agencies have now plastered their websites with banner messages blaming Democrats for the funding lapse.
Negotiations have gone nowhere. Six separate votes have failed since the start of the shutdown, and despite Republicans’ 53-seat Senate majority, they need 60 votes to pass any funding bill. Only three Democrats have defected from Schumer’s caucus so far.
The current crisis recalls the 35-day shutdown of 2019, during Trump’s first administration, when unpaid controllers began calling out en masse, forcing the FAA to slow traffic into major airports like LaGuardia and Newark and ultimately pressuring Congress to cut a deal.
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