The Trump administration has sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to US airports as air travellers face longer security lines due to the partial government shutdown. Federal agents have been seen making at least one arrest at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, according to eyewitness accounts.
The deployment reflects the deepening crisis at American airports. The shutdown has left 50,000 TSA officers without pay for over a month. This has caused more than 400 TSA officers to quit and thousands to call out from work because they are not able to afford gas, childcare, food, or rent. The agency has deployed "hundreds" of ICE officers "to airports being adversely impacted."
ICE agents have been seen at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Newark, New Orleans, John F. Kennedy, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Phoenix, and San Juan. Wait times at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport stretched beyond two and a half hours, while travellers at LaGuardia, Houston's George Bush Intercontinental and John F. Kennedy International airports faced waits of more than 40 minutes.
The government's justification for the move rests on a narrow premise. According to Atlanta's mayor, ICE agents will support TSA's "operational needs" such as "line management and crowd control within the domestic terminals," and federal officials have indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities. Border czar Tom Homan said ICE agents could man airport exits like TSA officers do to prevent people from coming through them.
Yet on-the-ground reports suggest a different reality. One video posted to TikTok shows unidentified, plain-clothed agents declining to identify themselves as they detain a person, including a child, past the security line at a terminal gate.
The deployment has triggered sharp criticism from both labour representatives and security experts. ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security, as TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons and threats designed to evade detection at checkpoints. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted that "untrained ICE agents lurking at our airports is asking for trouble."
The underlying political dispute remains unresolved. Democrats have refused to fund DHS without additional guardrails on federal immigration agents, spurred on by the killings of two US citizens by such agents earlier this year. Congress failed to advance a DHS funding bill for the fifth time, leaving TSA, FEMA and other agencies in the lurch, while ICE still has plenty of funding after Congress allocated the agency billions of dollars last summer.