How ICE Went From Deport… to Airport

0:00Hey, it's Jess.

0:01Ryan Knutson:And Ryan. Tickets for our live show in Los Angeles are on sale now. Join us Tuesday, April 28th at the El Rey Theater at 8 p.m. There'll be special guests, conversations about the business of Hollywood, and afterwards, we'll stick around to meet you all. Find a link in our show notes to get your tickets before they sell out, which they did very quickly last time. See you there. See you there. Good morning. Step up. Step up. Step up. Waiting in the security line at the airport is never fun. But right now, it's really not fun. Because the lines these days are out of control. At Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, one of the busiest airports in the country, the TSA line stretches so far back, you can't even see where it starts.

0:51This is actually still the TSA pre-check line. This line now wraps outside. So if you think about it, it wraps around the inside four different times.

1:00Ryan Knutson:In Houston, the security line doesn't just stretch. It descends. It curves past the departure zone, downstairs through baggage claim, and spills out onto yet another floor. Stay at home. If you live in Houston and you have a flight today and it is not mandatory and it is leisure, do not come here. I'm literally on my way back home. I've turned around. The lines are bad pretty much everywhere. Whoever said the lines at JFK were fake are sabotaging you. It's a huge pain for travelers. And it's all because of a government funding showdown in Washington. It's because the Department of Homeland Security hasn't been funded for more than a month, which means TSA agents who are under DHS haven't gotten paychecks for more than a month and they're starting to walk off the job.

1:51Ryan Knutson:That's our colleague Michelle Hackman. She says the shortage of TSA agents is getting really bad at airports across the U.S., which is why, suddenly, a different kind of federal officer started showing up at many U.S. airports this week. Over the weekend, Trump announced on Truth Social that ICE was going to take over and help with airport security.

2:16Ryan Knutson:ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. the agency carrying out President Trump's mass deportation agenda. How unusual is it for ICE to step in at airports like this? It's pretty unprecedented. I mean, obviously we've been in this situation before where there have been government shutdowns and TSA has gone unpaid, but it's the first time that a president has thought, let's send in our immigration guys.

2:49Ryan Knutson:Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, March 25th.

3:01Ryan Knutson:Coming up on the show, how deportation officers ended up staffing America's airports.

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4:47Ryan Knutson:The Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, was founded after 9-11 to centralize airport security under one agency, instead of leaving it up to the airlines or private contractors. It was meant to make airports safer. But the change also made airport security more vulnerable to political infighting. Now, every time there's a government shutdown, the TSA is affected. There was a near total government shutdown just a few months ago, and TSA was obviously a victim of that too. The last shutdown lasted 43 days and ended in November. Then, in January, after ICE officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis, Democrats used a different budget deadline to pick another fight over government funding.

5:35Ryan Knutson:This time, specifically related to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS oversees ICE. Democrats really stood their ground and said, we are not funding the Department of Homeland Security unless this administration agrees to some limits on ICE's power, some sort of guardrails on how they're allowed to operate. And so what is it specifically that Democrats are demanding? They want a few things. I would say their two biggest demands are that ICE shouldn't be allowed to wear masks to cover their faces. And the other big one has to do with judicial warrants. Basically, there's this issue where ICE has said, we've decided unilaterally, and they did so actually secretly.

6:21They didn't even announce this policy change or even widely circulate it. But they said, we're going to allow our officers to break into people's homes to look for an immigrant if that person has received an order of deportation. The problem is that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment says everyone, immigrants and citizens alike, have this protection against unnecessary search and seizure. And so typically you need a judge to sign a warrant to break into someone's house. And ICE was skipping that step. And so Democrats wanted to write into the law, like, no, you must actually go get a warrant if you want to break into someone's home.

7:01Republicans and the White House in particular refused to sort of meet the Democrats' demands. And so DHS was allowed to shut down.

7:11Ryan Knutson:After the policy became public, a DHS spokeswoman said that people targeted under this policy, quote, have had full due process and a final order of removal from an immigration judge.

7:24Ryan Knutson:Without funding for DHS, TSA agents stopped receiving paychecks in late February. And earlier this month, many of them stopped showing up for work. The thing you have to remember about TSA agents is they're remarkably low paid. And if you miss multiple paychecks, I mean, the TSA union has been saying people are not surviving, right? They're getting part-time jobs to help pay for themselves. And we've seen the so-called call-out rate, the rate that TSA agents are calling sick to work, extremely high, particularly in some places, like up to 40 % of staff. That's how you end up with all those videos of airport lines stretching all the way out to the parking lot and people having to wait up to eight hours to make it to their gates.

8:10Ryan Knutson:So can you tell me the story of how this idea to send in ICE came about? Yeah, we're not exactly sure, but there is a curious series of events that went down right before Trump announced the policy. It started last Friday when a woman named Linda from Arizona called into a talk show hosted by a radio host named Clay Travis. Linda in Green Valley, Arizona. What you got for us? Well, Clay, I think I have a solution to the TSA problem. Linda had an idea. What we need to do is we need the supplement where we're missing out on TSA agents who can't afford to work for us anymore. We need to bring in ICE agents.

8:52Ryan Knutson:Clay Travis thought it was a great idea, and he started sharing it more widely. So Clay Travis went on Fox News, and he basically said, I have a brilliant idea. I had a caller on the show, the Clay and Buck show today, Charlie, and had an interesting idea. What if President Trump announced that ICE agents were now going to be supplementing TSA agents inside of all of the airports. And very soon after that, Trump tweeted out almost the identical idea. In a scrum with reporters, Trump said sending in ICE was his idea. Mine. That was mine. The idea was so simple, he said, that it reminded him of the story of the paperclip.

9:34182 years ago, a man discovered the paperclip. It was so simple. And everybody that looked at it said, why didn't I think of that?

9:44Ryan Knutson:But, but hold on a second though. If, if the TSA, DHS is not being funded. The TSA is part of DHS, but ICE is also part of DHS. So how is it that ICE has funding to do this work? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. So over the summer, Republicans passed this bill. It's called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Oh, right. This is Trump's big piece of landmark legislation that he passed last year. Exactly, exactly. And in that bill, Republicans gave DHS$170 billion basically to carry out the mass deportation. A huge amount of that money was allotted to ICE. And specifically, it doesn't run on sort of the annual funding cycle the way normal funding does.

10:32It's like this money that ICE has that expires in 2029, and they can use it whenever. And so basically ICE has been able to continue paying all of its officers even though their normal funding is shut down.

10:45Ryan Knutson:So how did the Department of Homeland Security receive this decision by the president? What did they think of it? First of all, we were told that they were taken completely by surprise. They learned the same moment that we all saw Trump's post on Truth Social. You know, I reached out to people at ICE over the weekend, and they were like a mix of panicked, incredulous, confused, definitely unhappy about the position they've been put in. Why? I think it's a few things. I think, first of all, ICE is an agency with a mission, and that is to arrest and deport immigrants in the country illegally. And people who work at ICE believe in that mission, and particularly now they believe in this idea that they're supposed to be carrying out a mass deportation for Trump.

11:34Suddenly Trump is taking a lot of agents off their normal jobs and having them do airport security. I mean, that was, like, really, really frustrating for people. And not to mention, ICE agents don't have any training in airport security, right? They're trained to, like, arrest immigrants. They're trained in immigration law.

11:53Ryan Knutson:On Monday, about 100 to 150 ICE officers started showing up to just over a dozen airports across the country. And rather than run actual security, they're doing more crowd control, like monitoring exits and guiding people to the right lines. Trump border official Tom Homan said this frees up tasks so that the remaining TSA agents can do the actual screening work that they're trained for. What has the DHS said about how much of an impact this is having on these long lines? Not much, as far as I can tell. They're definitely, you know, defending the president's decision to send ICE and saying that it's making America safer, but no signs yet that it has, like, drastically improved the situation.

12:37Ryan Knutson:During a press briefing today, a White House spokesperson said wait times at TSA lines have gone down. But how long could it take to get TSA back up and running? That's next.

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13:59Ryan Knutson:The situation at airports and the decision to send in ICE officers is putting pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to reach a deal. President Trump recently suggested that the whole thing was giving him an advantage. When I announced yesterday about ICE, the Democrats called, we want to settle, we want to settle. And I told the people, don't settle, don't settle. — It's interesting, right? I mean, that was his framing of it. And certainly there were some Democrats who were pretty unhappy about the fact that ICE was being sent to airports because they just find the tactics of ICE so unacceptable.

14:39Ryan Knutson:— Democrats, meanwhile, say it gives them the leverage. — To other Democrats, it actually kind of signaled that Trump was realizing what a political crunch these TSA lines were creating for him. And so in some ways, I think the Democrats think it brought him to the table rather than vice versa. This is Donald Trump yet again falling back to what is his only play, which is to double down, to dig in, to send. That's Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman. — Why doesn't he take the deal that John Thune had reached, that is on the House floor right now, to fund TSA? — Either way, now that both sides are at the table, there's been some movement on Capitol Hill.

15:29Ryan Knutson:Over the weekend, Republican Senator John Thune met with Trump and proposed a solution. The idea was to fund all of DHS, but to leave ICE funding specifically to a process called reconciliation, which is basically a way to fund certain things with a simple majority in the Senate. So how did Trump respond to this deal about funding all of DHS except for ICE? He rejected it at first and pretty publicly. He told Republicans, don't negotiate with Democrats. He also said, I'm not signing this unless it also passes with the Save America Act. Only settle if you get the Save America Act. The Save America Act is Trump's top legislative priority right now.

16:12Ryan Knutson:It's a bill about voter eligibility. Among other things, it would require people to prove citizenship before registering to vote and show government-issued ID at the ballot box. Tell me more about that. Is that likely to happen? Could this actually help get the Save Act passed? I would say the mood on the Hill yesterday was like people almost laughing that Trump had said that because everyone knew that that was impossible. Why is it impossible? Democrats are pretty uniformly against the SAVE Act, and Republicans are not uniformly for it. And you know the way the Senate math works is that they need 60 votes to pass legislation.

16:53They barely even have 50 votes right now.

17:00Ryan Knutson:Even though Trump initially rejected Thune's proposal about funding all of DHS except for ICE, some lawmakers in Congress are trying to push ahead anyway. As of, you know, Tuesday morning, Democrats, Republicans, and the White House were sort of zeroing in on this deal that's not perfect for anyone, as deals often are. Basically what it does is it funds all of DHS except the part of ICE that is responsible for the stuff that you and I know ICE to do, basically arresting and deporting immigrants. So it's sort of like we had this government shut down and we funded the whole government and just kept the DHS issue open.

17:43Ryan Knutson:And now we're going to just like do a miniature version of that again where we're just going to fund like most of DHS and not like the most controversial part and just keep kicking the can on the road. Exactly. You nailed it. But as we talked about earlier, ICE has all this funding already from the big, beautiful bill. So is withholding funding from DHS actually having any impact on ICE's actual work? I would say on the margins, but really the big thing to know is that ICE has so much money sloshing around from the big, beautiful bill that it doesn't really matter to them. And you saw Republicans, I mean, Republicans had this really interesting rhetorical shift where for weeks they were talking about the importance of funding ICE.

18:25We can't leave ICE hanging. ICE is so important. To suddenly yesterday you had John Thune and others saying, we pre-funded ICE. Like that was so smart of us. We gave them all the money they need and we can actually move ahead without getting them any more money. So how close do you think this crisis at the airports is to being resolved

18:46Ryan Knutson:and TSA agents being able to start receiving paychecks again? You know, as a policy reporter in Washington, I've learned to never make really confident guesses. Right. But there's a really strong pressure on Congress to try to get this solved before they go on their two-week recess on Friday. If Congress isn't able to reach a deal by Friday, then the airport chaos could continue for another two weeks at least. Yesterday, Trump expressed frustration with the ongoing negotiations in Congress, which don't include his Save America Act. Well, I don't want to comment until I see the deal, but as you know, they're negotiating a deal.

19:25I guess they're getting fairly close, but I think any deal they make, I'm pretty much not happy with it.

19:33Ryan Knutson:Even if they can reach a deal to fund DHS, it might still take a while for the TSA to recover. Employees there have now had to go long stretches without paychecks twice in the last year. And many of them have quit. It could take the TSA time to staff up again. What does this mean for ICE, meanwhile, which has this mission of trying to deport people and now is having, even if it's a short-term, detour at the airport? It's such an interesting moment for ICE. You know, we have reported that Trump was pretty unhappy with how DHS handled the huge operation in Minneapolis, that he feels that some of ISIS operations just went too far, looked bad, made him look bad.

20:19And some in the administration fear that he's lost some interest in doing some of the large scale immigration raids that he campaigned on and promised he would do. And I think people are seeing this through that prism, that if he's taking ICE agents off their normal job to do airport security, that that sort of lends credence to the idea that he's not so interested.