ICE agents frustrate airport workers as closure continues

On Thursday for hours Security lines snaked through New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. The wait was far from the longest in the country, with George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston reporting a three-and-a-half-hour wait. More than a month after a partial government shutdown left some Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees working without pay, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents are calling in sick or walking out of work en masse, creating travel chaos across the United States. The solution in the Trump administration? Send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents there.

ICE agents were deployed to at least 14 airports on Monday, ostensibly in an effort to speed up security lines — and five days after the ICE incursion, airport employees are furious. ICE agents and Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) who work for the TSA tell WIRED they don’t have the proper certifications and training to perform many of the tasks that might actually speed up security lines. TSA employees say they are frustrated by the situation, and worried about what it might mean for their future.

ICE agents were spotted walking in groups, patrolling security lines and baggage areas. They have been seen giving directions to missing passengers, been photographed handing out small bottles of water to those waiting in line and, more often than not, standing around appearing to do little. “ICE is here and doing nothing to help,” passengers in a security line heard an airline employee complain Wednesday at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

Some passengers stuck in line spotted ICE agents being trained to check passengers’ IDs and boarding passes, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. At a hearing before the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, acting head of the TSA, Ha Nguyen McNeil, said that “the function of screening travel documents is one of TSA’s non-specialized screen functions,” and said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are trained to conduct the searches.

Transit operators say the presence of ICE is frustrating for those who work without pay — especially since ICE agents are paid. “If you want to bring a tactical force into an environment that requires you to have customer service and a mindset where you know what you’re doing, how to identify something that might be suspicious — they don’t get that training,” says Hedrick Thomas, a security officer and president of AFGE Local 2222, which covers airports in New York and New Jersey.

Security officers say they’re worried about their co-workers, who, thanks to the government shutdown last fall, haven’t received a steady paycheck for half the fiscal year. Agents worry about paying rent, mortgages, gas, and child care. Food banks have suspended flights at several airports, including Houston, North Carolina and San Diego. In Knoxville, Tennessee, airport authorities are accepting donations for employees at a Delta Airlines office. Eleven percent of airport checkpoint staff were called in on Tuesday, compared to 4 percent before the shutdown, a federal official testified before Congress on Wednesday morning. Some airports, including those in Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans and New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, have seen daily recall rates higher than 35 percent. The agency says more than 480 TSA screeners have resigned since the shutdown began in February.

In the long term, security officers say they are concerned that the federal government plans to replace them with other federal agents, including ICE agents, or private sector employees. One of them mentioned Project 2025, a blueprint for the second Trump administration published by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which calls for the entire TSA to be privatized.

“Part of the American Dream that was sold to me was that working in government was honorable and stable,” said Carlos Rodriguez, a security officer and vice president of the AFGE TSA Council 100 that represents Northeast airports from New Jersey to Vermont. “But that’s not honorable or stable at this moment.”