Millions of Americans this week got an up-close view at Donald Trump’s strongman impulse to use law enforcement officers and the military to solve his political problems.
The president — after months of violence and chaos in American cities — is cynically leveraging the idea of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers inside more than a dozen major airports to pressure Democrats to vote for his agenda.
Instead, ICE officers have largely been seen standing around, leaning on barricades, talking and texting on phones, and staring at long security lines that they can’t move any faster.
It’s the latest of his largely performative deployments and politically motivated posturing to force Democratic officials to comply with his administration while also unleashing violent and sometimes lethal force against citizens and immigrants alike.
Whether it’s surging ICE and Border Patrol into Minneapolis or calling on the National Guard to pick up litter in the nation’s capital, Trump routinely treats federal law enforcement and a federalized military as his own personal army, or what a federal judge last year called “a national police force with the president as its chief.”
Democratic officials and civil rights groups have accused the president of manufacturing crisis after crisis to justify boots on the ground in their states and cities, then declaring “victory” when they’re inevitably pulled out to go somewhere else and leaving terrorized communities in their wake.
Trump, unmoored from any close advisers willing to argue against his impulses in his second term, is doing what he tried to do in his first, when he allegedly urged cops to “crack skulls” and “beat the f*** out” of protesters, or “just shoot them” instead.
Thousands of immigrants were arrested in the Minnesota surge while the president used allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext for what officials there called an ongoing “invasion,” while none of those arrests were linked to those initial fraud cases. ICE and Border Patrol agents killed two people, and another person died in custody, adding to an in-custody death toll under ICE that is already on track to be the deadliest administration in decades.
Roughly 2,500 National Guard troops were pulled out of their states to patrol Washington, D.C., to address what Trump called an “epidemic of crime,” but members of Congress “cannot point to tangible crime reduction successes specifically tied to their efforts.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that domestic troop deployments across the country last year cost nearly half a billion dollars.
And desperate to end a partial government shutdown that kicked off after Democratic lawmakers refused to pump more funding into Homeland Security without any guardrails against future violence and warrantless arrests, Trump deployed ICE officers to at least 14 airports where travelers are facing hours-long wait times to get through security.
Twice within the same week, Trump also floated sending National Guard troops into airports next.
The White House insists ICE is making a dent, whether officers are handing out water or holding travelers’ spots in security lines so they can use the bathroom. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said one officer “jumped into action and restored an infant’s breathing who was unresponsive” inside John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
ICE officers were seen checking identification at security terminals in several airports and waving them through checkpoints, though it’s unclear whether their efforts are speeding up the lines. A spokesperson for Homeland Security said officers received “standard TSA training curriculum” to help.
Trump didn’t seem to know exactly what they’ll be doing, suggesting on Monday that they’re making immigration arrests and providing “security like no one has ever seen before” and then thanking them two days later for “helping people with bags” and “picking up and cleaning areas” with their “much larger, and harder, muscles.”
But Transportation and Security Administration agents say ICE can’t do their jobs, which have been unpaid for more than a month during the DHS shutdown. Even TSA workers don’t seem to know what ICE is actually doing there other than getting paid to be ICE.
“They’re the reason that we’re not getting paid,” one worker unloaded to New York magazine.
“A tweet went out and the next day they’re at the airport walking around sipping coffees, holding on to their vest,” they wrote. “They arrived on Monday, and now they’re hanging out in the break room doing nothing. They’re warming up their lunch. I don’t know what you’re hungry from — you didn’t do anything!”
ICE’s presence instead appears to be a warning to Democrats and Republicans who won’t break up a filibuster to get his agenda through Congress: Fund DHS and pass a sweeping election law that also targets transgender Americans, or deal with them.
“The Democrat shutdown has created chaos for American travelers and TSA employees alike,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Independent.
“Our great ICE officers are always ready to step in and help the American people when needed,” she said. “President Trump’s brilliant idea to send ICE to airports has helped make the travel process smoother for travelers and provided much-needed relief to TSA employees who the Democrats have forced to work without pay for so long.”
After repeatedly rejecting Democratic proposals that would separately fund TSA while hashing out plans for the rest of DHS, Republicans were reportedly pushing the White House for a state of emergency in a desperate bid to bail themselves out of the process altogether.
Trump said Thursday night he would sign an order to “immediately pay” TSA agents, and hours later, in the dead of night, the Senate passed a measure to fund DHS — leaving ICE and Border Patrol out of the picture, for now. “This could have been done three weeks ago,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
House Republican leaders immediately rejected the deal, and the Senate is in recess for two weeks through Easter.
Former ICE lawyer-turned-whistleblower Ryan Schwank warned that ICE officers are “outside their experience.”
“Not only does this place these agents into unfamiliar roles, it forces the public to submit to a criminal checkpoint system if they wish to exercise their freedom of travel,” he said. “At best, this forces Americans to accept the same kind of checkpoint systems once used in the Soviet Union and East Germany. At worst, it could result in a violent confrontation between a tired traveler and an inexperienced agent.”
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