ICE agents will be deployed to US airports to ease long lines on Monday | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan confirmed that the President’s administration will send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to U.S. airports starting Monday to assist with security amid extremely long lines and to assist airport security officers who have been working without pay since February 14 due to the partial government shutdown.
Homan will lead that effort, Trump said Sunday.
One Sharing on Truth Social“ICE will be going to the airports to help our greats,” Trump said. [Transportation Security Administration] Agents who remain on duty despite a shutdown caused by a U.S. Senate deadlock over stricter regulations on federal immigration enforcement.
Homan, meanwhile, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday and said “we’ll be at the airports tomorrow.” It remained unclear what responsibilities ICE officers would have, and Homan said Sunday that details were still being finalized.
“There are TSA agents guarding the exits. People coming in through the exits. Certainly a highly trained ICE law enforcement officer can guard an exit, make sure people aren’t going through those exits, aren’t entering the airport through the exits,” he said on CNN.
“Things like that make the TSA officer comfortable to go to the screening and reduce those lines. I don’t see an ICE agent looking at the X-ray machine because they’re not trained on that. There’s some security parts that TSA does; we can take them off those jobs and put them into specific jobs and help them move those lines.”
More than 400 TSA agents have quit their jobs since the partial government shutdown began. According to NBC Newsand others say they are sick. There have been paralyzing waits at security checkpoints operated by the TSA across the United States.
Senate Democrats have blocked funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees the TSA, as it seeks reform after immigration agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in separate cases in Minneapolis in January.
Pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash about how well thought out the plan would be if it were still being finalized Sunday, Homan said: “How much planning does that represent?” [sic] Guarding the exit to make sure no one goes through it?
Trump said Saturday that ICE agents at airports “will provide security like no one has ever seen before.”
The Trump administration deployed ICE agents to crackdown on immigrants across the country; This, in addition to murders, US citizens – led civil rights violations.
Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, slammed ICE agents at airports in his own appearance on CNN.
“The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be stationed at airports across the country to potentially brutalize them or, in some cases, kill them,” Jeffries said. “We have already seen how ICE behaves.”
