TSA workers have a very strong message for Donald Trump
The union representing Transportation Security Administration officials has a message for President Donald Trump: Thanks, but no thanks.
On Monday morning, the president sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to several airports to supposedly alleviate long security lines created by the partial government shutdown. But union representatives for TSA officers say the president’s plan is futile at best and could actually make things more dangerous.
“Our guys are going to be angry,” said Joe Shuker, regional vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents TSA officers.
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Shuker told News themezone that he received a text message Monday morning about ICE agents showing up at Philadelphia International Airport, one of 14 locations where the administration planned to send them. He wasn’t sure exactly what ICE agents would be doing, but he knows they’re not trained to do what TSA agents do: detect airport-specific security threats, like pipe bombs inside luggage and fake passports.
“There is no way this will help,” he said of the new assignment of ICE officers.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said Sunday that the administration would begin by deploying agents to the largest airports with the longest wait times, but added that they would not check luggage. Homan was also unsure what ICE agents would do and said he was “working on the execution plan now.”
“Certainly a highly trained ICE police officer can cover an exit and make sure people don’t go through those exits,” Homan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” ““Things like that relieve the TSA officer of having to do screening and reduce those lines.”
But many airports don’t even have departures staffed by TSA, Shuker noted. And when they do, securing an exit is often one of the least stressful tasks in their rotation, and one of the few that allows a TSA agent to sit still the entire time.
Shuker also worries about the spectacle of having perhaps the most hated federal agency on the ground at crowded airports, attracting news crews and raising fears among immigrant services workers, perhaps prompting even more sick calls.
“Our guys don’t need any more distractions,” he said.
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Several large airports have seen brutally long security lines while an unusual number of TSA agents called in sick. They haven’t been paid in weeks due to the partial government shutdown that began Feb. 14, leaving much of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the TSA, unfunded.
TSA agents will miss their next paycheck this Friday. As News themezone reported last week, hundreds have resigned and many more are contemplating taking other jobs rather than face the prospect of even more closures in the future. “At some point, everyone is going to run out of money,” one agent said.
“Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a void. It creates one,” Everett Kelley, president of AFGE, said in a statement.
“Our TSA members 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 armed, untrained agents who have proven how dangerous they can be,” Kelley said.
Democrats have insisted that any funding deal include some basic accountability measures for ICE operations, such as removing agents’ masks and implementing stricter rules on use of force. Trump has resisted any compromise and, according to Punchbowl Newsrejected a GOP-backed deal to fund all of DHS except ICE. Such a proposal could have seen TSA agents paid and security lines returned to normal, leaving Congress to debate ICE’s problems later.
Sending ICE agents to airports would do nothing to speed up a deal and, on the off chance that their presence actually helps shorten lines, could only prolong the stalemate in Congress. Shuker said the only solution was for Trump to sign an agreement to fund TSA paychecks.
“The president is sending in ICE and paying them to do the work of our officers — in fact, paying them more than us,” he said. “If they paid TSA, they wouldn’t need ICE’s help. There would be no lines. There would be no calls.”