Shockingly, ICE Hasn’t Fixed the Airport Crisis
Our take
The recent decision to deploy ICE agents to airports, as highlighted in the article “Shockingly, ICE Hasn’t Fixed the Airport Crisis,” raises serious concerns about the state of our nation’s air travel. As TSA employees continue to face pay cuts and overwhelming workloads, the introduction of ICE—a government agency already under scrutiny for its controversial practices—only complicates an already chaotic situation. This move appears to reflect a misguided attempt to address security and efficiency at airports, when in reality, it may exacerbate existing issues. For more context on the current state of aviation, see our related articles, There Were Warnings and American Aviation Is Near Collapse.
The irony of adding ICE agents—whose primary role often involves enforcing immigration laws and detaining individuals—into an environment that demands customer service and efficiency cannot be overstated. As the article points out, it seems counterintuitive to bring in personnel whose experience revolves around the deportation of individuals rather than the facilitation of safe travel. This is particularly concerning when we consider the implications for travelers, especially marginalized communities who may already be apprehensive about their treatment by law enforcement. The notion that ICE agents will alleviate TSA bottlenecks feels more like a cruel joke than a practical solution, and it raises questions about the kind of environment we want to foster in our airports.
Moreover, the lack of training for ICE agents to operate within the airport ecosystem further complicates matters. The article indicates that their presence may not only fail to improve security but could also create additional confusion and fear among travelers. Instead of streamlining processes, we might see an increase in anxiety and delays as passengers navigate new layers of enforcement with no clear benefit. This situation is reminiscent of asking someone untrained to handle a complex task; the likelihood of chaos only increases. The implications for travelers are profound, and it’s essential to consider how this shift could influence the overall travel experience, trust in our institutions, and our sense of safety while flying.
As we look ahead, the integration of ICE into airport security raises a critical question: What is the ultimate goal of this deployment? If the aim is to improve safety and reduce wait times, we must critically examine whether the chosen solution is effective or merely a band-aid on a much larger wound. As travelers and citizens, it’s vital to voice our concerns and hold our government accountable for the choices it makes in the name of security. The airport experience should be one of efficiency and comfort, not one where travelers feel like they are entering a heightened state of scrutiny.
In the coming weeks, it will be essential to monitor how this situation unfolds. Will the presence of ICE agents lead to improved airport conditions, or will it deepen the divide between travelers and security personnel? As we navigate this new reality, one thing is clear: we must advocate for solutions that prioritize the safety and dignity of all travelers, rather than adding layers of complexity to an already strained system.
There are few situations so bad that they can’t be made worse by adding ICE: Your house is on fire? Here’s ICE! Now your house is still on fire, and someone has entered it with a “judicial warrant” to rifle through your burnt belongings. You’ve just suffered a massive cranial injury and don’t remember any of your rights? ICE is here—and it doesn’t remember your rights either.
Seeing the chaos at airports as TSA employees enter another week without pay, Donald Trump has decided to add ICE. Yes, ICE, the very government agency whose treatment of citizens and noncitizens alike has been so egregious that legislators have put Department of Homeland Security funding on hold.
Who will help at the airport? How about the people whose only experience with planes is putting people on them against their will, to never see their families again? Say what you want about the TSA, but it is at least trying to get you safely to your family in a place where you are intending to go.
The good news is that, as everyone keeps observing, the airport is a notoriously calm place where people are always at their best. This is due to Sean Duffy’s sterling leadership as secretary of transportation. Before his tenure, there were some problems. People sometimes got a horrifying glimpse of a fellow traveler in pajamas. And families got the one call you never want to get from a loved one who was traveling by plane: “Sweetheart, my plane just landed safely and I am fine, but I can’t see a SINGLE PULL-UP BAR ANYWHERE IN THIS AIRPORT!” Fortunately, Duffy solved both of these issues. Now he is resting on his laurels, and perhaps when he is good and rested he will look into modernizing the air-traffic-control system (not urgent at this time).
Will the presence of ICE help with the TSA overwhelm? The White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, has suggested that “certainly, a highly trained ICE law-enforcement officer can cover an exit—make sure people don’t go through those exits, enter an airport through the exits. And stuff like that relieves that TSA officer to go to screening and to reduce those lines.” That’s probably the biggest problem at airports right now. I have to assume that the six-hour-plus lines at Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson airport are 50 percent people who are going through the wrong door, so we can look for a decrease in wait time of three hours once this radical suggestion is implemented.
Otherwise, ICE agents can just stand there, not looking at X-ray machines. (“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine,” Homan said, because they are “not trained in that.”) This marks the first time in the existence of Trump-era ICE that a lack of training has prevented agents from doing something.
So far, the addition of ICE to monitor doors and not look at X-ray machines has, fascinatingly, not instantly solved our airport problems. Indeed, it is hard to think of a set of people less equipped to improve anything about the airport situation. This is like asking a tarantula to watch your laptop. It won’t help, and now everyone is scared. No, I’m sorry. This is unfair to tarantulas, who are not known for their racial profiling.
The best-case scenario with ICE agents at the airport is that they stand around unhelpfully, doing nothing. The worst-case scenario is that going to the airport will now require some kind of ICE Pre-Check subscription to avoid having lethal force deployed against you for no reason.
On top of all this, Trump is instructing ICE not to wear masks during its airport deployment, on the grounds that these masks are not necessary. But how can this be? ICE needed its masks before to face down its most dangerous foes (children in bunny hats, harried moms, restaurant workers), and the airport is overflowing with those. How can we rob agents of this key tool at this time? There is no way they will be able to face such deadly enemies as children in strollers, families traveling together, seniors, members of the military, and others with preferred-boarding status. If they don’t need masks in airports, they don’t need masks anywhere.
Read on the original site
Open the publisher's page for the full experience
Related Articles
- There Were WarningsOn Saturday, President Trump announced plans to deploy ICE agents to help with security at airports across the country, given all of the TSA workers who are either quitting or not showing up because they haven’t been paid for weeks. Last night, an Air Canada airplane collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing two pilots and hospitalizing scores of passengers. These twin crises are separate but related: They are both the result of an approach to governance that neglects the work of governing. Anyone with even a passing interest in air-traffic safety knows that near misses have grown more frequent. In the New York area, there have been two close calls this month alone: An Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 nearly collided with a FedEx Boeing 777 in Newark last Tuesday, and another Air Canada flight nearly hit an EVA Air 777 Boeing at John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 12. When a tragedy is averted, some presume that the system is working, a phenomenon in disaster management known as the “near-miss fallacy.” But many complex systems on the brink of failure leave clues, and near misses are flashing red lights. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former Fox News host who spent the weekend blaming Democrats for airport-security lines, is not in fact in charge of airport security. He is in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration, which handles air traffic and mishandled the Air Canada landing at LaGuardia. If he didn’t know before, he hopefully knows now that what happened yesterday was not simply an outlying tragedy, but the inevitable culmination of long-standing safety concerns and shortsighted funding cuts. [Read: American aviation is near collapse] Duffy has assured the public and Congress that the administration’s sweeping cuts to federal agencies and workers did not directly affect air traffic controllers, who have been in short supply for years. But DOGE cuts included hundreds of FAA workers, which has compromised air-traffic safety. Early accounting suggests that only one air traffic controller may have been on the job at LaGuardia at the time of the crash yesterday, given that the control-tower recording features only one voice clearing taxiing on runways as well as takeoffs and landings. Whoever was in the tower was also distracted by an emergency on another airplane that required the fire truck. The administration’s hasty move to deploy ICE agents at airports will likely do little to make life easier or safer for travelers, or do much to endear this controversial arm of the Department of Homeland Security to more Americans. The DHS, which handles the TSA, is still reeling from the exit of Kristi Noem, its ineffective and attention-seeking former secretary, who expensively cosplayed her way through her tenure and trained an entire homeland-security apparatus on the threat posed by undocumented dishwashers and their young children. Somehow, no one at DHS predicted that a funding fight over ICE’s aggressive conduct might create a problem with TSA workers not showing up to work because they aren’t getting paid. The fact that anyone at the top is shocked by snaking security lines at airports is of a piece with the administration’s rather cavalier approach to contingency planning. (See also the war in Iran.) The Trump administration has devoted this term to manufacturing fake threats and neglecting quite a few real ones, such as the steady erosion of departments and systems designed to protect people, including airline passengers. Public safety is not a given—and Americans are learning that it is no longer something that they can take for granted.
- American Aviation Is Near CollapseThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The American commercial-aviation system is a modern marvel. On any day of the week, a passenger can get to and from nearly any two cities of decent size and to destinations on five other continents, for a relatively affordable price and with exceptional safety. Or at least all of that was true until recently. Today, the system seems near collapse. Travelers around the country are facing long security lines: two to three hours at New York airports, three in Atlanta, two in Houston. Checkpoints are staffed by the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has not been paying TSA workers since Valentine’s Day because of a partial government shutdown. Meanwhile, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, one of the nation’s busiest, all flights are paused until at least this afternoon after an Air Canada jet collided with an airport fire truck on a runway, killing two pilots and injuring dozens of other people. Nearly 1,000 flights leave from or arrive at LGA every day, and hundreds have been canceled. A closure at LaGuardia puts pressure on other airports in the area, and they might not be prepared to handle any redirects. This morning, reports of smoke in the air-traffic-control tower at Newark Liberty International Airport, just across the Hudson River from New York City, caused a brief ground stop. Officials determined the problem was a burning smell in an elevator and reopened the tower, but this is only the latest sign of how broken Newark airport is. Last week, an Alaska Airlines plane nearly crashed into a FedEx plane on a runway at Newark, missing by just 300 to 325 feet, after pilots were instructed to avoid a collision. And earlier this month, a Singapore Airlines plane clipped the wing of a Spirit Airlines jet while pushing back from a gate. Last spring, air-traffic controllers lost the ability to track planes at Newark for two brief intervals, causing such stress that some of them took leave. Each of these situations had its own specific causes, but what unites them is years of disinvestment capped by political dysfunction. Modern air travel was a classic postwar American triumph: a big, complicated system built with lots of money and careful tracking. Deregulation of the airlines in the 1970s made flying cheaper and more widely available. A careful, iterative process of safety regulation culminated in a 16-year period, from 2009 to 2025, when no U.S. airline had a fatal crash. Yet the system was quietly eroding from within. For many passengers, the most visible sign was the deterioration of airports themselves. In 2014, then–Vice President Biden said that LaGuardia resembled “some third-world country.” Although LGA has since been renovated, other, more essential parts of the system have continued to get worse. The federal government has been trying to run air traffic control on the cheap for decades, which has resulted in staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment. Many towers are operating below recommended capacity. After the outages last spring, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy panned the infrastructure used to keep flyers safe. “We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” Duffy said. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.” Yet despite warnings from airlines and regulators, successive congressional sessions and presidential administrations have failed to fix the problem. The FAA has also seen what’s known as “regulatory capture”: Cozy relationships with Boeing, for example, helped problems with the 737 Max escape notice until a pair of fatal crashes abroad in 2018 and 2019. More recently, the FAA abruptly closed the El Paso, Texas, airport in a standoff with the Defense Department over laser weaponry. The FAA appears to have made the move as a desperate step after its safety worries weren’t taken seriously. The ploy worked: The FAA drew attention to its concerns and the airport reopened, but in any functional administration, this would have been resolved behind closed doors much earlier. When an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last January, President Trump immediately jumped to blame DEI, a claim as nonsensical as it was repellent. Following multiple investigations, the FAA has changed some rules to prevent a similar incident, but Congress couldn’t agree on an air-safety bill that offered broader fixes. A different sort of political dysfunction has snarled passenger experiences. TSA is charged with keeping travelers safe not from aviation failures but from threats of violence. While its approach has often been more security theater than essential, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported in 2008, some screening is necessary. But DHS is unable to pay agents for this work because of the partial shutdown. Following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have demanded reforms in exchange for funding the department, and neither they nor Trump have been willing to budge. TSA agents, who are not well paid in the first place, have not received paychecks since February, and the situation seems to have hit a breaking point in the past few days. (Some airports have begged people to donate gift cards or food for TSA agents.) Over the weekend, Trump said that he would “move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will 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.” (DHS has moved funds so that ICE agents, unlike TSA, are being paid.) Administration “border czar” Tom Homan has since said that ICE won’t be doing screening but will take on other, unspecified roles. The administration has insisted that border security is an emergency, so pulling agents off their jobs to do something else seems odd. More broadly, the administration is deploying ICE agents outside of their training in a dubious attempt to ease a political crisis created by ICE agents who had been deployed outside of their standard role in Minnesota. (Trump said today that he would deploy the National Guard to assist if ICE agents could not alleviate wait times.) The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed “kludgeocracy,” in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. “‘Clumsy but temporarily effective,’” Teles has written, “also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.” The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.