The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), representing 820,000 federal workers, is raging over Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents assisting the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) with airport operations as the partial government shutdown continues.
President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that ICE agents would assist TSA at major airports across the country as disruptions worsen. Trump border czar Tom Homan also confirmed the move on Sunday. As a result, agents are assisting TSA in at least 14 airports nationwide:
- Chicago-O’Hare International Airport
- Cleveland Hopkins International Airport
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
- Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport
- Houston’s Bush intercontential
- John F. Kennedy International Airport (New York)
- LaGuardia Airport (New York)
- Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport
- Luis Munoz Marin International Airport (San Juan, Puerto Rico)
- Newark Liberty International Airport
- Philadelphia International Airport
- Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport
- Pittsburgh International Airport
- Southwest Florida International Airport (Fort Myers, Florida)
However, the AFGE disagrees with this move, contending that TSA agents should simply be paid and not replaced with what AFGE President Everett Kelley described as “untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”
“More than 50,000 TSA employees have worked without pay for over five weeks. Hundreds have quit. And Washington’s answer isn’t to pay them. It’s to send ICE agents to do their jobs,” Kelley began in the March 22 statement.
He continued:
ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security. TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints — skills that require specialized instruction, hands-on practice, and ongoing recertification. You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one.
Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe. They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.
“Congress has the power to fund TSA today,” he added. “It’s time for them to stop playing politics and do their jobs.”
While there have been leftist concerns over immigration enforcement, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (D) confirmed that ICE agents — at least at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — would be providing critical public support including “line management and crowd control within the domestic terminals.”
“Federal officials have indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities,” he said.
As for Kelley’s assertion that ICE agents are untrained, Tom Homan noted that they receive “a high level of training” and that many ICE agents are already assigned at airports across the country.
“ICE agents are assigned at many airports across the country already,” Homan explained. “They do a lot of investigation, criminal investigations of smuggling at airports. But, you know, there’s — I mean, we’ve got TSA agents covering exits, you know, people that enter through the exits certainly, highly trained ICE law enforcement officers can cover an exit.”
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