WASHINGTON—The congressional fight over funding Transportation Security Officers—the airport screeners—just got worse.
Congress remained stuck in a deadlock over funding the screeners, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the rest of the Homeland Security Department, minus more dollars for right-wing GOP President Donald Trump’s vicious and violent ICE and Border Patrol agents. The deadlock began on February 14.
Now, Trump, in a March 22 phone interview with News Nation and a tweet on his Truth Social platform, demands senators, including the Democrats, pass his Save Act—the GOP’s massive voter repression bill—or there’ll be no deal at all.
Congressional Democrats have been ready to fund the department, but not ICE and the Border Patrol, without a lot of safeguards: Regular search warrants, no massive sweeps, no masked agents, no invasions of schools, homes, churches, mosques, synagogues, hospitals, and businesses, and no unprovoked violence.
Rank-and-file voters would go even further: The most recent poll, in early March, shows 91% of Democrats and 52% of independents want to defund and abolish ICE. Overall, some 55%-60% of respondents, depending on the poll, want to abolish ICE.
Trump and the Republicans want no shackles on ICE—the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service—and the Border Patrol at all.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” his new name for the bill, Trump trumpeted on Truth Social.
“It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate, and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems (who are to blame for this mess!), a Five Billion Dollar cut in ICE funding, a deal which, even when disguised as something else, is unacceptable to me and the American people,” Trump added.
“The fascist Democrats will never protect America. The Republicans will,” he added in another tweet.
Besides shackling ICE, the Democrats also demand impartial investigations of ICE and Border Patrol murders of U.S. citizens, Renee Michelle Good and Alex F. Pretti in Minneapolis. They were monitoring ICE’s invasion in Operation Metro Sweep there. Trump’s Justice Department refuses to cooperate in state and local investigations of the murders.
Given this deadlock, lawmakers gave up, for now, and went on an Easter-Passover recess, angering unions that represent the screeners and airline workers.
That irked Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley in particular, but other unions, led by the Association of Flight Attendants/CWA, joined in. AFGE represents the screeners, even though Trump has yanked their contract.
Meanwhile, news reports say lines at major airports and wait times are getting ever longer, and the unpaid Transportation Security Officers, who will miss their third straight two-week paycheck on March 27, are calling in sick in droves. Estimates range from 11% out at Atlanta to one-third at New York’s airports. And 400 Transportation Security Officers have quit, so far, to take other jobs.
Kelley, whose union still represents the Homeland Security Department workers—though not the ICE and Border Patrol agents—leads the charge for Congress to stay in town and pass the legislation to pay the 47,000 TSOs, 9,000 workers in the Coast Guard, and other workers. Trump yanked the contracts for all Homeland Security workers.
“The House and Senate have had weeks to fix this, and they have barely been in the same [U.S. Capitol] building,” said Kelley. “Members of Congress walked past our TSA members at airport security checkpoints more often than they’ve met to negotiate an end to this stalemate.
‘Those officers deserve to be paid for the work they do…The least Congress can do for these patriotic American workers is act before legislators leave town for the weekend, or, worse, head off on a weeks-long recess.
“A TSO selling plasma to keep the lights on is unconscionable,” Kelley said. “Tens of thousands of families turning to food banks because Congress refuses to do its job is a national disgrace. This is a profound moral failure, and the American people should know who’s responsible for it.
“The time for excuses is over,” Kelley said. “Pass a measure to reopen DHS, pay these workers, and don’t go home until you do.”
Besides the lack of training—screeners go through a detailed two-month security course and aren’t fully certified until they work alongside senior officers after that—there’s one other big problem with bringing ICE agents to airports: ICE’s violent sweeps for anyone brown.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, whose city hosts one of the two busiest U.S. airports, said in a statement, “federal officials indicated this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities. All federal personnel will report directly to TSA for the duration of this assignment.” There was no confirmation of the mayor’s statement on the Homeland Security Department website or its social media feeds.
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