President Donald Trump announced plans to move Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to airports on Monday to help Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents manage security checkpoints.
“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on March 21.
Trump revealed his plans to move ICE agents to airports one day after the Senate failed to advance a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been in a partial shutdown since Feb. 13.
“I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!” Trump added in a second Truth Social post on Saturday.
Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s decided to move forward with deploying ICE agents “to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job.”
Trump did not reveal which airports the ICE agents would be deployed to but added that he would order them to immediately arrest “all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”
As lawmakers on Capitol Hill remain at a stalemate, federal employees in the agencies under DHS have been working without pay due to the lapse in federal funding that started in mid-February.
Agencies under the DHS umbrella include TSA, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Coast Guard.
Some TSA agents have had to sleep in their cars and go to food banks just to stay afloat, while others called in sick, which has caused hours-long security lines, according to Homeland Security.
There are growing concerns that some airports will have to temporarily close down due to TSA staffing shortages.
Billionaire Elon Musk offered on Saturday to help pay TSA workers.
“I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country,” Musk said in an X post.
Since the start of the partial shutdown, Democrats have refused to support funding bills because they want to change immigration enforcement policies, particularly those involving ICE.
Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed a motion on Saturday to advance a bill that would fully fund TSA — but not the entire DHS. It failed in a party-line vote of 49 to 41.
This article was originally published by The Epoch Times.
