Trump says he will deploy ICE to airports as TSA shortages drive delays
Border czar Tom Homan said ICE agents will be at airports to help TSA agents, but he does not expect they will do specialized tasks, such as X-ray screening.

President Donald Trump said he is sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports Monday, after threatening to do so unless congressional Democrats agree to a GOP-backed funding deal.

“ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents,” Trump said in a social media post on Sunday morning, escalating a standoff over the funding deal that has caused a partial government shutdown and slowed security lines at airports nationwide.

He intensified the pressure Sunday evening, instructing Senate Republicans in another post to refuse a deal unless Democrats back a bill requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration and pH๏τo identification at the polls, among other voting restrictions.

Senate Democrats unanimously oppose the bill, which Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) has warned would make it harder to vote, describing it as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Republicans control the Senate 53-47, and the bill would require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, giving it no path to pᴀssage.

Deploying ICE agents to checkpoints nationwide would mark an unprecedented expansion of immigration enforcement even as Democrats push for тιԍнтer limits on how those agents operate, citing concerns that the administration has fast-tracked training to expand ICE’s ranks. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, who focus on criminal investigations, and officers who specialize in detention and deportation are expected to be at the Atlanta International Airport on Monday, the city’s mayor said in a statement.

Mayor Andre Dickins, in the statement, said that “federal officials have indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities.”
In an earlier post to Truth Social over the weekend, Trump said the ICE agents would “do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”
Speaking to CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, White House border czar Tom Homan said the administration is working to identify what exactly ICE agents will be doing and which airports they will be ᴀssigned to. Homan said he expected to have a plan by the end of the day.

“We will be at the airports tomorrow helping TSA move those lines along,” he said.
Homan told “Fox News Sunday” that he does not envision that ICE agents will help with X-ray screening or other work that requires specialized training. But he said they can do other tasks — such as guarding exit doors or checking pᴀssengers’ identification before they enter a screening area.

John Sandweg, a former acting director at ICE during the Obama administration, said the impact of the new deployment will largely be determined by the details of its execution — including which ICE agents are sent, how many and where inside airports they are stationed.
Sandweg emphasized that when the Transportation Security Administration is short-staffed, the biggest slowdowns tend to occur at X-ray machines, baggage screening and ID checks — functions that would be dangerous to delegate to untrained officers. “I find it hard to say operationally there’s any basis to do this other than to use ICE again as a political wedge to try to put pressure on Democrats to end the shutdown,” he said. “I think that’s what this is all about.”

Homan said the deployment “allows the TSA officer to go back to screening to move people through quicker.”

“We’re trying to release TSA resources to get to positions they really need expertise like the X-ray screening. We’re going to be a force multiplier.”
Joe Shuker, a regional vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 100, which represents TSA employees, said that managing exits has become less staffing-intensive with the adoption of automated exits, and much of TSA agents’ other work requires specialized training and technical expertise.
“It doesn’t seem like a lot of help,” Shuker said of the plan to send ICE agents to airports.

Democrats immediately criticized the administration’s plan.
“This is really disturbing,” Schumer said Sunday on the Senate floor. “ICE agents, who are untrained and have caused problems everywhere they’ve gone, lurking at our airports? That’s asking for trouble.”

For more than a month, Democrats have refused to pᴀss a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security — which includes ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as well as TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies — until Republicans agree to new accountability measures for immigration enforcement agents. But the agencies Democrats are seeking to change, ICE and CBP, have largely been able to continue operating with billions of dollars from the Republican tax and spending bill pᴀssed last year.

The congressional standoff has left the majority of TSA employees working without pay for weeks, prompting an increase in worker absences at airports and threatening worsening disruptions for travelers as spring break nears for millions of students.
The changes Democrats are seeking include a requirement that ICE agents get a warrant from a judge before forcefully entering homes and that they cease wearing masks. The Trump administration has agreed to several requests, including the expanded use of body-worn cameras and limiting civil enforcement activities at certain locations, including hospitals, schools and places of worship.

Seeking to strike a deal to fund DHS, Homan has met with senators at the Capitol twice in recent days, but the negotiations have not yielded a breakthrough.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), speaking Sunday on CNN, urged Republicans in both chambers to pᴀss legislation to pay TSA officers even as the DHS shutdown continues. Jeffries noted that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) have indicated support for such a measure.

“Let’s bring those bills to the floor in the House and the Senate tomorrow so we can get TSA agents paid,” Jeffries said.
Trump accused Democrats of hurting “so many people with their vicious and uncaring ways.”
“What they have done to the Department of Homeland Security, our fantastic TSA Officers, and, most importantly, the great people of our Country, is an absolute disgrace,” he wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.

The funding battle is playing out against the backdrop of a leadership transition at DHS. Trump said this month that he would replace Secretary Kristi L. Noem with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma). The Senate voted Sunday to advance Mullin’s nomination, setting up a final confirmation vote as soon as Monday. Two Democrats — Sens. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Martin Heinrich (New Mexico) — joined Republicans in voting to advance the nomination.
Spokespeople for several major U.S. airlines, including United Airlines and American Airlines, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday on the ICE deployment.
Juliette Kayyem, who served as DHS ᴀssistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs in the Obama administration, told The Post that the deployment is likely to create “legitimate fear” for some travelers “given the broad mandate ICE seems to have had in the last couple of months.”
Marianne LeVine, Meryl Kornfield and Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.