Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s immigration advisor, confirmed on American television. From this Monday, March 23, ICE agents, the now famous immigration police (ICE), will be deployed in some American airports to carry out security checks. They will come to the aid of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, who are facing a severe shortage of personnel due to a partial budget paralysis.
Since February 14, the funding of the Department of Homeland Security that oversees the TSA has been frozen due to a deep rift between Democrats and Republicans in Congress over immigration police practices, heavily criticized on the left. Because of this partial “shutdown,” thousands of federal workers have been furloughed. Some of these agents, in essential roles, continue to work unpaid.
This situation generates an average absenteeism rate of 10% at airports, according to Transportation Minister Sean Duffy who blamed the Democrats. He later specified that this rate rises to 30 to 40% in some places. This leads to long queues, during a typically busy period for airports because of spring break, the university holidays. He warned that the situation would get “much worse” over time as more TSA agents “will resign or fail to show up at their post” in order “to take another job to buy food and pay their rent.”
Security Tasks Donald Trump announced on Saturday his intention to send ICE agents to complement the workforce. Tom Homan confirmed that an undetermined number of immigration police officers would be deployed on Monday, giving “priority to major airports where the queues are longest, up to three hours.” He specified that the deployment details were being worked out with ICE and TSA officials.
According to Tom Homan, the goal is for police officers to be responsible for simple security tasks, such as monitoring exit doors, so that TSA agents can focus on specialized control posts. “I don’t see an ICE agent supervising an X-ray scanner, because they have not been trained for that,” he noted.
