Airports on ICE

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The prevailing feeling on Monday was that at least the ICE agents at airports around the country weren’t shooting people.

At least that’s what I heard from travelers who reached out to me throughout the day to share photos and stories of what they were seeing on the ground the day after Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan announced federal agents would be fanning out while TSA remains severely-understaffed during the partial DHS shutdown. What would these agents be doing? Homan was asked. Hard to say. And after a day of witnessing them in action, the answer is no more clear.

The first dispatch I received was early Monday morning from a traveler flying out of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. She’d arrived around 5:50am Eastern for a 10:10 flight after hearing ICE would be there, on top of reports of many hours-long security lines. “I saw 4 ICE agents within 5 minutes just walking around,” she told me. “One had a ‘federal agent’ patch, one had an ‘ICE’ patch, and the other two were not clearly marked.”

She explained that she entered the security line at 6am outside of the building. “Saw my next set of agents at 7am once I got inside. They’re in the mezzanine just watching us. Not doing anything that I can tell besides just having a presence.” She also said she saw around 20 local police officers deployed to help with line management. 

After three hours and 20 minutes, she made it through security. “I didn’t see ICE agents help with anything the entire time! They just stood around chatting it up with each other,” she said.”

I also received a couple of dispatches from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, where one traveler reported ICE agents were “standing in a circle in the middle of terminal A with some folk filming them and occasionally an agent is walking up and down the long lines of people. No evidence they are doing any of the work of a TSA agent at all.”

In a Sunday TV appearance, Homan made it clear ICE agents wouldn’t be tasked with actual TSA duties. “I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because [they’re] not trained in that,” he told CNN. “There are certain parts of security that TSA is doing, that we can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs, help move those lines.”

The Houston traveler said he spotted about 12 agents, including a few walking around baggage claim where the line for security was snaking. “Only seen them pacing and cracking jokes with each other which at least is not assault!” He said the agents he witnessed were mostly patrolling in a security capacity or just hanging out.

In a particularly cringeworthy moment shared with me via video, another Houston passenger recorded fellow travelers on the hours-long security line while Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” blared through the airport speakers. Proud to be an American, indeed.

New Orleans was the airport that generated the most messages on Monday. “I’m at the bag drop area, before security,” one traveler told me. “They’re literally just walking around in groups of three and four, seemingly without any true purpose.”

She noted they were wearing vests identifying them as either ICE or a federal agent, layered over casual clothes. “They are carrying sidearms,” she said. “But they’re just casually walking around carrying bottles of water and Gatorade.”

One NOLA traveler sent over photos of agents leaning on the glass railing of a mezzanine area that overlooked the security area below, seemingly bored, and another shared a photo of a group of them lined up at a line nearby behind the area where you pick up trays for your stuff to pass through security. 

“I'm a white anti-Zionist Jew —naturalized citizen raised by Holocaust survivors—traveling with my Black wife,” she explained. “We both live with an undercurrent of dread, which will spike based on external circumstances.” 

She and her wife even discussed beforehand what they would do if confronted by ICE. “Had we been sent through the security line of ICE agents, we would have followed the protocols we gamed out earlier: head down, no commentary, attempt to de-escalate politely if necessary. Then we would have gone to the nearest bathroom and puked our guts out.”

I also received messages from travelers in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago O’hare, and all three New York City-area airports. From these disparate locales, the commentary remained pretty much the same: The presence of ICE was certainly not helping anyone, it wasn’t speeding up security lines, and at worst it was making people uncomfortable.

Late Sunday night an Air Canada flight arriving at New York’s Laguardia Airport collided with a fire truck responding to an incident on another plane. The flight’s two pilots were killed and dozens of passengers were injured. There’s speculation it may have been a result of understaffed Air Traffic Control, a problem that predated this partial shutdown. With ICE arriving a few hours later, it certainly added to the feeling that everything is on fire.