There are very few situations that can’t be made worse by adding ICE: Is your house on fire? Here’s ICE! Now your house is still on fire, and someone has broken into it with a “court warrant” to shoot a gun through your charred belongings. Have you suffered a severe head injury and can’t remember any of your rights? ICE is here—and it doesn’t remember your rights either.
Seeing the chaos at airports as TSA workers enter another week without pay, Donald Trump has decided to add ICE. Yes, ICE, the same government agency whose treatment of citizens and non-citizens has been so abhorrent that lawmakers have suspended funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Who will help at the airport? What about people whose only experience flying is putting people on them against their will, never to see their families again? Say what you want about the TSA, but at least they are trying to get you and your family safely to where you intend to go.
The good news is that, while everyone is watching, the airport is a quiet place where people are always at their best. This is due to the excellent leadership of Sean Duffy as transport secretary. Before his leadership, there were some problems. Sometimes people got a terrifying glimpse of their fellow traveler inside pajama. And families received the one call you never want to receive from a loved one who was flying: “Honey, my plane just landed safely and I’m fine, but I can’t see ONE BLESSING ANYWHERE IN THIS AIRPORT!” Fortunately, Duffy solved both of these issues. Now he’s resting, and maybe when he’s nice and rested he’ll look at modernizing the air traffic control system (not so fast at this point).
Will the presence of ICE help with TSA overwhelm? The White House “border king,” Tom Homan, has he suggested that “certainly, a highly trained ICE law enforcement officer can handle the exit—make sure people don’t go through those exits, get into the airport through the exits. And things like that make that TSA officer happy to go check and narrow those lines.” That is probably the biggest problem in airports right now. I have to assume that the six-hour lines at Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson airport are 50 percent of the people who go through the wrong gate, so we can look for a three-hour wait time reduction once this drastic proposal is implemented.
Alternatively, ICE agents can simply stand by, without checking the X-ray machines. (“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine,” Homan said, because “they’re not trained in that.”) This marks the first time in Trump-era ICE that a lack of training has prevented agents from doing something.
So far, the addition of ICE to monitor gates and not check X-ray machines, thankfully, has not immediately solved our airport problems. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a set of people ill-equipped to improve anything about the state of the airport. This is like asking a tarantula to look at your laptop. It will not help, and now everyone is afraid. No, I’m sorry. This is unfair to tarantulas, who are not known for their color profiles.
The best case the environment for ICE agents at the airport is that they stand by helplessly, doing nothing. The worst case scenario is that going to the airport will now require some form of ICE Pre-Check registration to avoid having negative power sent against you for no reason.
On top of all this, Trump is ordering ICE not to wear masks when being taken to the airport, on the grounds that these masks are unnecessary. But how can this be? ICE has needed its masks in the past to deal with its most dangerous enemies (kids in bunny hats, battered mothers, restaurant workers), and the airport is full of them. How can we rob the agents of this important tool at this time? There is no way they will be able to deal with such dangerous enemies as children in the stroller, families traveling together, the elderly, military personnel, and others with boarding status. If they don’t need masks in airports, they don’t need masks anywhere.
