Dem
47
GOP
53
Sunday morning, Donald Trump sent out a bleat on his antisocial social media site saying ICE agents would go to airports starting today to "help" TSA agents. Of course, they are completely untrained to do the work TSA agents do, which is to make sure no one smuggles weapons or explosives onto airplanes. Trump wrote that ICE agents would "do security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia." Deploying ICE agents to airports would be a massive expansion of immigration enforcement.
On CNN's State of the Union yesterday, border czar Tom Homan said the administration is working to decide what the agents will do at airports and hoped to have it worked out by the end of the day. If the plan is hatched Sunday evening and the agents start Monday morning, that means the agents will have no training at all. They will just freestyle. Looking at an x-ray of a suitcase or a scan of a person, and trying to see if there is anything dangerous there, takes months of training. So what will the agents do? Maybe look for people with brown or skin and pull them out of line to interrogate them about why they are flying, where they are going, and why? Even in the Jim Crow South they never did that.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said: "ICE agents, who are untrained and have caused problems everywhere they've gone, lurking at our airports? That's asking for trouble." That is putting it mildly, to say the least. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was less polite: "The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country potentially to brutalize or to kill them." Not all Republicans are on board with the plan. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was asked about the plan and she said: "Not a fan of that."
Maybe the next step is to send ICE agents to supermarkets to check the papers of anyone entering to make sure they are legally in the U.S. That would prevent undocumented immigrants from getting food, so they would have to choose between self deporting or starving. Of course, citizens without proof of citizenship would starve too, but, hey, no system is perfect. Trump could minimize inconvenience by doing this only in blue cities and states.
Of course, the long lines at airports could be alleviated by just paying TSA agents so all of them came to work. This is what the Democrats have proposed, but Republicans are not willing to accept this. They want all of DHS funded with no restrictions on ICE agents. Democrats want to rein in ICE in various ways and are not willing to fund all of DHS until Trump agrees to reining in ICE. (V)