How ICE Went From Deport… to Airport

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It's getting hard, it's getting harder up, it's getting harder up.

Waiting in the security line at the airport is never fun.

But right now, it's really not fun,

because the lines these days are out of control.

At Hart's Field Jackson in Atlanta,

one of the busiest airports in the country,

the TSA line stretches so far back

you can't even see where it starts.

This is actually still the TSA pre-check line.

This line now wraps outside,

so if you think about it, it wraps around the inside

for different times.

In Houston, the security line doesn't just stretch,

it descends, it curves,

pass the departure zone, downstairs through baggage claim,

and spills out onto yet another floor.

Stay at home, if you live in Houston,

and you have a flight today,

and it is not mandatory in this leisure, do not come here,

I'm literally on my way back home, I've turned around.

The lines are bad pretty much everywhere.

Whoever said the lines at JFK were fake,

are sabotaging you, I don't know what.

It's a huge pain for travelers,

and it's all because of a government funding showdown

in Washington.

It's because the Department of Homeland Security

hasn't been funded for more than a month,

which means TSA agents who are under DHS

haven't gotten paychecks for more than a month,

and they're starting to walk off the job.

That's our colleague, Michelle Hackman.

She says the shortage of TSA agents

is getting really bad at airports across the US,

which is why suddenly a different kind of federal officer

started showing up at many US airports this week.

Over the weekend, Trump announced on truth

social that ICE was going to take over

and help with airport security.

ICE, immigration and customs enforcement.

The agency carrying out President Trump's

mass deportation agenda.

How unusual is it for ICE to step in at airports like this?

It's pretty unprecedented.

I mean, obviously we've been in this situation

before where there have been a government shutdowns

and TSA has gone unpaid, but it's the first time

that a president has thought, let's send him

our immigration guys.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business,

and power.

I'm Ryan Knutzen.

It's Wednesday, March 25th.

Coming up on the show, how deportation officers

ended up staffing America's airports.

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The Transportation Security Administration,

or TSA, was founded after 9-11

to centralize airport security under one agency.

Instead of leaving it up to the airlines or private contractors,

it was meant to make airports safer.

But the change also made airport security

more vulnerable to political infighting.

Now, every time there's a government shutdown,

the TSA is affected.

There was a near total government shutdown just a few months ago,

and TSA was obviously a victim of that too.

The last shutdown lasted 43 days and ended in November.

Then, in January,

after ICE officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis,

Democrats used a different budget deadline

to pick another fight over government funding.

This time, specifically related to the Department of Homeland Security,

DHS overseas ICE.

Democrats really stood their ground and said,

we are not funding the Department of Homeland Security

unless this administration agrees to some limits on ICE's power,

some sort of guardrails on how they're allowed to operate.

And so, what is it specifically that Democrats are demanding?

They want a few things.

I would say they're two biggest demands,

or that ICE shouldn't be allowed to move wear masks to cover their faces.

And the other big one has to do with judicial warrants.

Basically, there's this issue where ICE has said,

we've decided unilaterally,

and they did so actually secretly.

They didn't even announce this policy change,

or even a widely circulated.

But they said, we're going to allow our officers to break into people's homes

to look for an immigrant if that person has received an order of deportation.

The problem is that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment says everyone,

immigrants and citizens alike, have this protection against unnecessary search and seizure.

And so, typically, you need a judge to sign a warrant to break into someone's house.

And ICE was skipping that step.

And so, Democrats wanted to write into the law,

like, no, you must actually go get a warrant if you want to break into someone's home.

Republicans and the White House in particular refused to sort of meet the Democrats' demands,

and so, DHS was allowed to shut down.

After the policy became public,

a DHS spokeswoman said that people targeted under this policy,

quote, have had full due process and a final order of removal from an immigration judge.

Without funding for DHS,

TSA agents stopped receiving paychecks in late February.

And earlier this month, many of them stopped showing up for work.

The thing you have to remember about TSA agents is they're remarkably low paid.

And if you missed multiple paychecks,

I mean, the TSA union has been saying people are not surviving, right?

They're getting part-time jobs to help pay for themselves.

And we've seen the so-called call-out rate,

the rate that TSA agents are like calling sick to work,

extremely high, particularly in some places, like up to 40% of staff.

That's how you end up with all those videos of airport lines stretching all the way out to the parking lot,

and people having to wait up to eight hours to make it to their gates.

So can you tell me the story of how this idea to send in ice came about?

Yeah, we're not exactly sure,

but there is a curious series of events that went down right before Trump announced the policy.

It started last Friday when a woman named Linda from Arizona called into a talk show hosted by a radio host named Clay Travis.

Linda in Green Valley, Arizona, what you got for us?

Well, Clay, I think I have a solution to the TSA problem.

Linda had an idea.

What we need to do is we need the supplement where we're missing out on TSA agents

who can't afford to work for us anymore.

We need to bring in ice agents.

Clay Travis thought it was a great idea,

and he started sharing it more widely.

So Clay Travis went on Fox News,

and he basically said, I have a brilliant idea.

I had a caller on the show, the Clay and Buck show today, Charlie had an interesting idea.

What if President Trump announced that ice agents were now going to be supplementing TSA agents inside of all of the airports?

And very soon after that, Trump tweeted out almost the identical idea.

In a scrum with reporters,

Trump said sending in ice was his idea.

That was mine.

The idea was so simple, he said, that it reminded him of the story of the paperclip.

182 years ago, a man discovered the paperclip.

It was so simple.

And everybody that looked at it and said, why did I think of that?

Ice was my idea.

But hold on a second, if the TSA,

DHS is not being funded.

The TSA is part of DHS,

but ice is also part of DHS.

So how is it that ice has funding to do this work?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good question.

So over the summer, Republicans passed this bill.

It's called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Oh, right.

This is Trump's big piece of landmark legislation that he passed last year.

Exactly, exactly.

And in that bill, Republicans gave DHS $170 billion,

basically to carry out the mass deportation.

A huge amount of that money was allotted to ice.

And specifically, it doesn't run on sort of the annual funding cycle,

the way normal funding does.

It's like this money that ice has that expires in 2029,

and they can use it whenever.

And so basically, ice has been able to continue paying all of its officers,

even though their normal funding is shut down.

So how did the Department of Homeland Security receive this decision by the president?

What did they think of it?

First of all, we were told that they were taken completely by surprise.

They learned the same moment that we all saw, Trump's post on Truth Social.

You know, I reached out to people at ice over the weekend,

and they were like, a mix of panicked, incredulous, confused,

definitely unhappy about the position they've been put in.

Why?

I think it's a few things.

I think, first of all, ice is an agency with a mission,

and that is to arrest and deport immigrants in the country legally.

And people who work at ice believe in that mission,

and particularly now, they believe in this idea that they're supposed to be carrying out

a mass deportation for Trump.

Suddenly, Trump is taking a lot of agents off their normal jobs

and having them do airport security.

I mean, that was like really, really frustrating for people.

And not to mention, ice agents don't have any training in airport security, right?

They're trained to like arrest immigrants.

They're trained in immigration law.

On Monday, about 100 to 150 ice officers started showing up

to just over a dozen airports across the country.

And rather than run actual security, they're doing more crowd control,

like monitoring exits and guiding people to the right lines.

Trump border official Tom Holman said this frees up tasks

so that the remaining TSA agents can do the actual screening work that they're trained for.

What does the DHS said about how much of an impact this is having on these long lines?

Not much, as far as I can tell.

They're definitely defending the president's decision to send ice

and saying that it's making America safer, but no signs yet

that it is drastically improved the situation.

During a press briefing today, a White House spokesperson

said wait times at TSA lines have gone down.

But how long could it take to get TSA back up and running?

That's next.

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The situation at airports and the decision to send in ice officers

is putting pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to reach a deal.

President Tramp recently suggested that the whole thing was giving him an advantage.

What I announced yesterday about ICE,

the Democrats called,

we want to settle.

We want to settle.

And I told the people, don't settle.

Don't settle.

Because we have to settle.

It's interesting, right?

I mean, that was his framing of it.

And certainly there were some Democrats who were pretty unhappy about the fact

that ICE was being sent to airports because they just find the tactics of ICE so unacceptable.

Democrats, meanwhile, say it gives them the leverage.

To other Democrats,

it actually kind of signaled that Trump was realizing what a political crunch these TSA lines were creating for him.

And so in some ways, I think the Democrats think it brought him to the table rather than vice versa.

This is Donald Trump yet again.

Falling back to what is his only play,

which is to double down, to dig in.

That's Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman.

Why doesn't he take the deal that John Thune had reached

that is part of, is on the House floor right now, to fund TSA,

as well as every other agency.

Either way, now that both sides are at the table,

there's been some movement on Capitol Hill.

Over the weekend, Republican Senator John Thune met with Trump and proposed a solution.

The idea was to fund all of DHS,

but to leave ICE funding specifically to a process called reconciliation,

which is basically a way to fund certain things with a simple majority in the Senate.

So how did Trump respond to this deal about funding all of DHS except for ICE?

He rejected it at first and pretty publicly.

You know, he told Republicans don't negotiate with Democrats.

He also said, I'm not signing this unless it also passes with the Save America Act.

The Save America Act is Trump's top legislative priority right now.

It's a bill about voter eligibility.

Among other things, it would require people to prove citizenship before registering to vote

and show government issued ID at the ballot box.

Tell me more about that, is that likely to happen?

Could that actually, could this actually help get the Save Act passed?

I would say the mood on the Hill yesterday was like people almost laughing.

The Trump had said that because everyone knew that that was impossible.

Hmm, why is it impossible?

Democrats are pretty uniformly against the Save Act and Republicans are not uniformly for it.

And you know the way the Senate math works is that they need 60 votes to pass legislation.

They barely even have 50 votes right now.

Even though Trump initially rejected Thune's proposal about funding all of DHS except for ICE,

some lawmakers in Congress are trying to push ahead anyway.

As of Tuesday morning, Democrats, Republicans and the White House were sort of zeroing in on this deal

that's not perfect for anyone as deals often are.

Basically what it does is it funds all of DHS except the part of ICE that is responsible for the stuff

that you and I know ICE to do basically arresting and deporting immigrants.

So it's sort of like we had this government shut down and we funded the whole government

and just kept the DHS issue open.

And now we're going to just like do a miniature version of that again where we're just going to fund like most of DHS

and not like the most controversial part and just keep kicking the can on the road.

Exactly. You nailed it.

But as we talked about earlier, ICE has all this funding already from the big beautiful bill.

So it was withholding funding from DHS actually having any impact on ICE's actual work.

I would say on the margins but really the big thing to know is that ICE has so much money sloshing around

from the big beautiful bill that it doesn't really matter to them.

And you saw Republicans, I mean Republicans had this really interesting rhetorical shift

where for weeks they were talking about the importance of funding ICE.

We can't leave ICE hanging ICE is so important.

To suddenly yesterday you had John Thune and others saying we pre-funded ICE like that was so smart of us.

We gave them all the money they need and we can actually move ahead without them getting them anymore money.

So how close do you think this crisis at the airport is to being resolved

and TSA agents being able to start receiving paychecks again?

As a policy reporter in Washington, I've learned to never make really confident guesses.

But there's a really strong pressure on Congress to try to get this solved before they go on their two-week recess on Friday.

If Congress isn't able to reach a deal by Friday, then the airport chaos could continue for another two weeks at least.

Yesterday, Trump expressed frustration with the ongoing negotiations in Congress, which don't include his Save America Act.

Well, I don't want to comment until I see the deal, but as you know, they're negotiating a deal.

I guess they're getting fairly close, but I think any deal they make, I'm pretty much not happy with it.

Even if they can reach a deal to fund DHS, they might still take a while for the TSA to recover.

Employees there have now had to go long stretches without paychecks twice in the last year, and many of them have quit.

It could take the TSA time to staff up again.

What does this mean for ICE, meanwhile, which has this mission of trying to deport people and now is having even if it's a short-term detour at the airport?

It's such an interesting moment for ICE.

We have reported that Trump was pretty unhappy with how DHS handled the huge operation in Minneapolis,

that he feels that some of ICE's operations just went too far, looked bad, made him look bad,

and some in the administration fear that he's lost some interest in doing some of the large-scale immigration raids that he campaigned on and promised he would do.

I think people are seeing this through that prism, that if he's taking ICE agents off their normal job to do airport security,

that that sort of lens credence to the idea that he's not so interested.

My last question, Michelle, is I have a flight next week. Do you have any advice?

I'm also flying next week, Ryan, and I'm pretty nervous, too.

I'll see you in the TSA line, I guess.

Yeah, exactly.

That's all for today. Wednesday, March 25th.

The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal,

additional reporting in this episode by Natalie Andrews, Shavon Views,

Cam McWhorter, Harriet Torrey, and Rachel Wolf.

Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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